
Facebook shelved a feature intended to promote civil political discourse - aaronbrethorst
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/23/18154111/facebook-common-grounds-feature-conservative-bias-concerns-shelved-joel-kaplan
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zepto
Weird article. Gives the impression that a conservative operative sunk a
perfectly reasonable initiative for political reasons, and yet has absolutely
zero analysis of how the feature would have worked.

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sjroot
Right. This article, as well as the Wall Street Journal story, have zero real
description of what “Common Ground” would have done.

I also thought it was odd that the WSJ used this story, and the fact that he
was present at Kavanaugh hearings, to label Joel Kaplan as the sole
conservative on Facebook’s team. Seems like quite a presumption, though I have
never heard this guy’s name before.

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bertil
I’ve been advocating similar feature before, while I was in and since I left
the company and I’m happy that Facebook is trying (because it wasn’t always
the case, even when the problem was clearly identified internally). My version
was “the smartest person who disagree with this” (which was essentially my way
of having a permanent link to remind me of George Will’s name; can’t get it to
stick somehow).

A leak to the WSJ is interesting: I can’t imagine that who opposed what
feature could possibly come from anyone not inside (and high up) the company.
Even internally, those arguments rarely leave the product review, and that’s
at most a third of the executive committee, the product owner, maybe a couple
of members of the team and some directors in between. Leaking features before
release, or worst, cancelled features, that was _extremely_ frowned upon years
ago. With the current tone in the media, I can’t imagine it’s imaginable.
Either someone committed career suicide, or it came from higher up. I don’t
know how to read the media to understand if that could help Facebook within an
“us Facebook vs. Kaplan” narrative.

On the merit of the case, Joel Kaplan probably had a reasonable point: if the
feature mostly flags conservative sources and not the NYTimes, it could
incense the current pro-Trump movement further — even if one source is factual
and the Daily Stormer is… well, far less so. I can’t imagine there were no
ways around that, always offering a “correction” that might not contradict one
but would clearly challenge far more point in the other, trigger it
progressively, trying to understand the impact on far-right and more
reasonable people etc. (Facebook recently published paper able to detect and
automatically adapt a model to subtle controls like that.) A product like that
would not be scrapped, not after the first product review, but asked to tweak
some aspects. Either Kaplan has been consistently pushing against any version
of it (and that would be mentioned more clearly) or there’s more to it.

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dlo
> even if one source is factual and the Daily Stormer is…

I think it's disingenuous to use the Daily Stormer here as an example. I have
definitely come across publications on the left that play loose with the facts
or have unlikely explanations for directly observable facts.

It would be more fair to use something like PragerU:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45247302](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45247302)

~~~
bertil
Oh, I certainly don’t think it’s a black & white situation. I was just taking
the point of view of someone who needs to make a decision from a situation
where it’s unbalanced. Actually, pretty much every product Facebook has
launched had a well-known unbalanced impact: “get out the vote” efforts get
more young people out and they vote more to the left; detailing right to vote
drives a subset of potential voters (younger, recent citizens) which isn’t
balanced either; same for informing about candidates’ Page, or their program.
I suspect that getting a Hans-Rosling/Steven-Pinker-like effort to counter-act
spurious arguments with actual statistics would also not be neutral. All are
on principle laudable efforts; all don’t have a neutral impact on the vote.

I am able to name a right-wing rag because that one is in the press; in
general, I stay away from the nastier stuff. As I mentioned in the first
paragraph: I care about the smartest of the people who disagree with me and
contextualised, nuanced, balanced information. Neither PragerU, the Daily
Stormer or other come close to that.

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reaperducer
It would be nice if people would submit the original story instead of another
web site’s re-write of the original report.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-lonely-
conservative-t...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-lonely-conservative-
takes-on-a-power-position-11545570000)

And people wonder why the journalism industry struggles to make money.

~~~
IshKebab
That's paywalled...

