
Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia - sravfeyn
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/opinion/serbia-facebook-explore-feed.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
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nof
Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a
choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build
something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about
Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the
situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then
you are part of the problem, not the solution.

~~~
mantas
The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the
web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again.

I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is
that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing
content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.

~~~
folksinger
The actual solution is to go for a walk in the woods with some friends or
family members.

The actual solution is to invite your neighbor over for dinner.

The actual solution is to volunteer at a retirement home.

The actual solution is to join an amateur sports league.

The actual solution is to take an in-person group class in a subject that you
find interesting.

~~~
Santosh83
In other words, confine computer use to research and communication in sci-tech
alone?

Not bad. It's probably how things should have been, but that boat has sailed
long, long back.

Point is, efforts to make decentralisation and independent content creating,
hosting and sharing should go on simultaneously with other social steps that
you have enumerated. Neither can replace the other.

------
therealmarv
Facebook is the worst way of getting news and information in general. It's not
the open independent web and by joining Facebook you agreed that you give them
control. So even when I understand the frustration and I agree with the
context... you all agreed to Facebook conditions ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
cguess
"Shut down and get off the internet" is what the leaders in these countries
_want_ people to do.

The question isn't for individuals, it's for distribution. If you're in these
countries essentially the _only_ way to reach the people these days is through
Facebook. Any other option and you're handing out a poorly xeroxed zine on the
side of the street. The president of the country used to explicitly run the
censorship of media in Yugoslavia. Nothing gets published without a tacit sign
off even now.

Facebook promised to democratize interactions, got every journalist in the
world to go along with it, and then pulled the carpet.

------
mtgx
I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically
promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And
now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned
he would do, and they didn't listen.

That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not
entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have
never believed that they were.

Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't
_fed_ by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small
government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread
their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that,
or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda
machine, better than TV ever was.

The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the
feeds to spread propaganda, they _can_ exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like
Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same.

This is why I'd rather _people do their own research_ and they do the job of
looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic
algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.

~~~
werewolf
Don't turn this into "media fighting against Facebook" thingy or whatever you
just tried. It's not only about them. Yes, they have the strength/influence
and they used it. But what about every other Page? What about small businesses
and communities that are now losing their viewers? They have no chance to get
noticed if they want to speak up against those changes. And yes you can say
that they should expect it, but maybe not? I think you shouldn't because FB is
just using its strength and is negatively affecting freedom of the internet.
Why freedom of the internet? Because of the size of the mass that they can
reach.

~~~
watwut
> What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their
> viewers?

There is no duty whatsoever for Facebook or reddit or twitter or any other
company to provide viewers for small businesses and communities for free. As
far as I know, facebook never even promised to not change this functionality.
If you claim to be search engine or use your power to damage competitors,
absolutely. If you selectively hide content to damage opposition, sure.

Maybe facebook should think about timing when there are election around or
something similarly important. But still, just like it was ok to separate
games from feed, it is ok to separate news from feed.

------
PunchTornado
Why is every complain about Facebook directed towards Zuckenberg. He is not
alone in this company. We are thousands of engineers that work here and make
fb what it is.

It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg,
even if he did not have any input on some issues.

I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or
other google thing does good or bad.

~~~
hectorlorenzo
Don't tell Mark you work for him but still can't spell his name.

------
dbrgn
It's a sad state of affairs if Facebook is a requirement for becoming a
working democracy.

~~~
fredley
That's not the point at all. Facebook just happens to be right now how most
people discover and consume news, in many (most?) countries. This is a
position of absolutely _enormous_ power, giving Facebook the ability,
deliberately or otherwise, to control and manipulate public discourse more
than perhaps any entity in history.

Moderation of public discourse – in the sense of keeping public discourse in a
roughly central place, and minimising the extent to which extremists can
manipulate it – is absolutely a requirement for a working democracy.

~~~
acqq
Facebook is not supposed to be public. That the random media got to fill up
the pages there was a bad thing.

Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook.
There are much more posts than anybody can read, those using Facebook agreed
to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.

~~~
quadrangle
> those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and
> designs.

Nonsense! EVERYONE clicks "I agree to the ToS" WITHOUT agreeing to the ToS.
They don't read it, they don't understand it, they aren't agreeing to it. The
suggestion that users actually agree is completely dishonest.

------
elhudy
>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it
but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to
Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and
their leaders.

I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which
likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a
hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up
using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and
should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.

~~~
muglug
If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing
wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no
harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.

~~~
elhudy
I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't
generally use facebook or care to read news about it.

With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what
is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to
decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes,
and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target
purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we
have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through
the black-box algorithm.

~~~
muglug
If Facebook fails, it doesn’t just affect Facebook’s users - it affects the
whole world.

------
r3bl
I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of
HN.

I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face
(especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people
because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries
randomly really pisses me off.

Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which
both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism
organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in
Silicon Valley.

~~~
oconnor663
Do you think they'd be better off without Free Basics at all, or more that
they'd be better off if it worked differently?

~~~
cguess
I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed
country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher
now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of
the population.

~~~
r3bl
Serbia doesn't. Other countries in this experiment (like Cambodia and
Venezuela) do.

~~~
cguess
Cambodia, where the last independent newspaper was just shut down:
[https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-
shu...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shutdown-of-
the-cambodia-daily)

------
Spoygg
I'm not sure this is explained well. Everything is still accessible, it's just
put on different tab. Now there's "News Feed" as before and "Activity Feed",
the tab just below "News Feed" tab.

It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab
also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what
pages you follow posted. The effect author describes might as well be
attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b)
people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those). From UX standpoint it
might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can
switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check.

For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes?
It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social
network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise
censored) political information floating around on it.

Specifically:

> You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have
> Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.

That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off
of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's
good advice.

------
_archon_
Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If
you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from
people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing.

From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social
media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?

~~~
mantas
The problem is FB indoctrinated users and soft-killed most alternatives. A
regular user don't care to signup for a newsletter or RSS feed. They "like"
page on FB and think that's enough to get updates.

I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals
subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate
to each other. Well, in fact they don't.

FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if
any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.

~~~
watwut
That is because most pages worked exactly this way for years - every update
was shared on facebook too. It was comfortable for sites for a while - people
were likely to hit like on facebook and got you in the feed they visit daily
for unrelated reasons. They are less likely to give you e-mail or start with
rss feed they don't use.

The alternative is not rss. The alternative is news aggregator few months down
the line when sites stop asking people to like them.

------
oconnor663
Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their
friends.

Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it
just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that
level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell
this story.

------
lowry
This is stupid. Facebook was bashed for influencing politics. It now tries to
avoid political discussion entirely by downplaying news from Pages, but it is
now bashed for it as well.

Where's your integrity, journalists?

~~~
cisanti
What a bullshit comment, Facebook needs to be more responsible with its
massive power, it can ruin countries.

Europe needs to do something about the Silicon Valley companies, we can't
build Chinese firewall but in order to have a chance for competition we need
to come up with a plan. One possible way to fuck off FB is because it's spy
machine that is very much illegal on some aspects.

~~~
nradov
Europe doesn't need a _plan_. High level central planning has never succeeded
in producing viable world-class competitors. That approach has already been
tried and failed. European countries would achieve better results by setting
up more favorable business climates and letting competition occur naturally.

(There's nothing wrong with European countries protecting their citizens with
data privacy and security laws. But that's separate from competition.)

~~~
cisanti
There is no need for central planning, but a little protection from central.
There is nothing wrong with protectionism.

------
spodek
Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox)
\-- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without
privately-owned central servers.

It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't?

What does it take for widespread support for the project?

~~~
jancsika
> It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central
> servers.

Early Bitcoin-- download this app and click the "Generate Coins" button. Now
you've got digital tokens in exchange for having verified the global state of
the transaction database. A problem was addressed by some software. Woot!
Somebody bought a pizza with these digital tokens, so mission accomplished.

Current IPFS-- lots of people add an important file/directory, and now other
people can retrieve that data. Doesn't exactly have a robust system to
discover things. But Catalonia used it to workaround some censorship, so it
must be at least minimally usable. Hence a problem was addressed with
software. Mission accomplished.

Freedombox-- please continue the pattern here. What technical problem does
Freedombox solve with software, and what is a single example of how it has
been leveraged to accomplish a mission by ordinary humans?

------
olivermarks
I have a suspicion that after the utopian western world phase with
autonomous/non passenger controlled vehicles is over, a country with few
traffic controls or systems will be a guinea pig for 'mass adoption'...

Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested
and then rolled out across the first world...

------
tzs
How _should_ sites design things like news feeds? Just go with their best
guess as to how it should work, and then never change that?

------
fareesh
This is sort of like arguing with your gym that Republicans lost Virginia
because they played only CNN and not Fox News on their TV, or played MTV.

~~~
muglug
Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and
their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can
change all the screens in harmony.

~~~
fareesh
Well in my hypothetical it does, so yes. The gym can still play what it wants.
You could argue that it ought to be responsible, which is fine, but there's no
entitlement.

------
m0skit0
Welcome to capitalism.

~~~
akerro
Vandalism on a scale of a country.

------
sremani
Even though their formats are different NYT et al. and FB are competitors.
Even though there is kernel of truth, the media witch-hunt of Facebook is out
of proportion.

Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about
democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that
Zuckerberg is eating their cake.

~~~
nof
What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat
to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around.

~~~
loceng
Treat or threat?..

~~~
cantrip
One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general,
is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily
ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead.

Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat,
and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than
you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to
everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.

~~~
loceng
Is it obvious though? I thought maybe they were being funny or clever by
perhaps meaning to use the word treat. Responded further here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703788)

No jab intended. I think assumptions are dangerous as well, and lead to more
problems - including internal distress - instead of perhaps putting inquiry
forward to ask for intentions instead. Obviously you're getting an answer from
me now, however you still may not believe my intentions.

~~~
cantrip
Let's break it down.

The first poster says Facebook "[is] not [a] concern for democracy".

The responder says "What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy.
Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the
other way around."

The first two sentences seems to imply that they disagree with what has just
been said, that is except for the word "treat", which implies that they
actually agree. If they are saying "treat" then they're saying not only is
Facebook not a concern for democracy, but it is actively beneficial.

However this argument is then immediately negated by saying "There are more
articles on this than the other way around." Ignoring the ridiculously false
logic of the statement, there are objectively more articles about Facebook
being a threat to democracy than there are about Facebook being a benefit to
it.

Thus I concluded the person meant "threat", which I found to be a very obvious
conclusion given the context of the statement.

~~~
loceng
I think you're not understanding me. If "Facebook is a treat for democracy" is
said sarcastically, it has the same meaning as "Facebook is a threat to
democracy."; sarcastic might be the wrong term, I can't think of the right one
at the moment.

------
featherverse
His name is phonetically "suckerberg". Do we really have to tolerate Facebook
and it's hideous negative influence on the world?

We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid
of it.

