
Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups - axiomdata316
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/facebook-emotional-support-groups/572941/?single_page=true
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bad_user
I joined a group for T2 diabetes at some point because I have a stubborn
friend that doesn’t want to receive proper treatment and I basically wanted to
ask about available options.

Next thing I know is that Facebook started giving me ads for diabetics.

Having such an influential company know about your illnesses and sell that to
advertisers or healthcare insurance agencies or credit agencies or god knows
what else is frankly terrifying.

~~~
xefer
So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad
preferences?

On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge
ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you.
If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away.
I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very
few ads and those that I go get are completely generic. I never see anything
that would seem creepily aware of who I am.

~~~
seandougall
It’s pretty good that they allow you to do that now, but it can’t
retroactively remove those interests from the personal data they’ve already
sold about you. So it fixes the smaller issue of what ads Facebook serves, but
doesn’t address the larger issue of privacy.

~~~
rock_hard
FB doesn’t sell your data though, never has!

What they sell is the ability to target you based on it. But the data never
leaves FBs servers!

So if you remove the tags from your settings, advertisers won’t be able to
target you with them anymore

~~~
fcarraldo
This isn’t the whole truth. Facebook doesn’t sell data, but Facebook’s Graph
API combined with microtargeting ad groups allows third party applications
that the user has authorized to gather and sell sensitive data to anyone they
want. In many cases, the data does leave Facebook’s servers as soon as the
action is taken.

You could argue this is the user’s own fault, but prior to Cambridge
Analytica, there was very little public understanding of what “connecting” an
app to Facebook really meant among the general population.

Also, just because Facebook doesn’t sell this data today does not mean they
never will.

~~~
rock_hard
Sure, third parties can request access to the graph API by asking the user for
permission.

But Facebook issnt selling that access! Access to the APIs is free.

Now users just giving any random app access is a whole different can of
worms...you have the same issue on Android and iOS with permission
dialogs...people worry about Amazon Alexa recording everything they say, but
will give any app microphone/camera access to do just the same if the app
creator is ill intended.

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antonkm
I support online groups, however I'd prefer staying anonymous which simply
isn't possible without faking your account on FB.

Reddit provides similar functionality and let's you stay anon. There's
subreddits for pretty much any situation: alcohol abuse, drug abuse, kids
growing up with narcissistic parents, spouses living in sexless relationships,
etc etc. I did some research into the topic after reading this:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/01...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
intersect/wp/2016/01/05/the-surprising-internet-forum-some-alcoholics-are-
choosing-over-aa/)

Just Google your specific situation and Reddit will probably have a support
sub.

~~~
sodosopa
Reddit is usually a crapshoot of quality.

Maybe someone will have something for Y Combinator (et al) soon, that's more
of a targeted platform for these types of things. Reddit and Facebook both
suck at this.

~~~
blahblahthrow
If there isn't a community on Reddit for something, what are the odds people
are going to flock to a new platform? The quality issue is because these
groups are generally peer-organized and some groups have better organizers.
But like, what is technology going to do to make a better Reddit for people
with depression, transgender people, people whose partners have cheated on
them and people with incredibly rare medical conditions? Those are disparate
groups that only have the common thread of needing a support group as far as I
can tell.

~~~
sodosopa
If a platform is promoted by physician groups or by insurers, it may take off.
That would be far better than some of the utter crap on Reddit. A lot is
happening in the medical space, with companies like Oscar and appointment
scheduling apps. This is just waiting to spring open.

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hanoz
I'd never seen beyond the login screen of Facebook until a site I run started
getting sporadic bursts of traffic from there, so I ventured in to try and
find the links. I was stunned and devastated to discover how many thriving
little communities there were in this niche area (local archeology), it's
everything the open web was supposed to be but it has been walled off,
completely invisible to outsiders, all for the benefit of one corporation and
its advertising customers.

~~~
tomrod
Economies of scale, I guess? Easier to host there than to have dedicated
hobbyists support the technology needs.

~~~
adventured
Ning showed some promise in being able to provide that. It took off like a
rocket initially. Maybe they benefited from launching in 2005, prior to
Facebook reaching any meaningful saturation (consuming all the oxygen in the
segment).

When they figured out the financial side of it wasn't going to work (having
raised $119m in VC), they essentially destroyed the old service in 2010,
suspended the free offering, and fired half the company. I've always wondered
if the original concept of Ning could have in fact succeeded, if they hadn't
built the company using the typical boom or die, drive the venture capital
into the wall model.

I think there's still something big there, if someone can figure out how to do
it very, very inexpensively and keep it open. Minimalize the commercial abuse,
build in strong spam and trust controls.

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jessems
I run a facebook breakup support group for men.

About half of the people that request to join the group discover the group
themselves on facebook.

For me as a website owner (rapidbreakuprecovery.com) the group has been a
convenient way to offer a forum-like functionality without any of the overhead
involved with running forum software.

I suspect facebook users have come to expect that these types of groups exist
and they're typing things such as "breakup" in the group search field.

There other breakup support groups that are routinely recommended in the
sidebar as well as a support group specifically for divorced dads. So it seems
that facebook's scale is allowing smaller niche communities to exist where
they would not have existed before.

From a usability perspective it's not great. It's easy to set up and it's easy
to get members, but I would happily switch to something more discrete, and
that's a better fit for support group dynamics (interesting idea by sodosopa).

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wufufufu
If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying
"feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private
group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally
clicking a single time while scrolling.

Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to
it on accident.

Please change this.

~~~
dymk
It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come
up with a solution.

Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

~~~
ravenstine
> it's very hard to actually come up with a solution

Just not have "suggested friends"? I've never gotten anything out of that
feature, and I imagine it provides little actual value to anyone since if
someone was actually a friend or even an acquaintance, they'd have that person
in mind when adding friends on Facebook.

~~~
btown
Or even have an ability for an admin of a group to turn off "suggested
friends" for that group alone. Ah, but that's not just a new boolean field in
the model, a database migration, GraphQL dependency, and an if statement in
the template... but also a committee meeting to clear the text used in the
admin's interface, translations to all languages used by Facebook (you
wouldn't want Facebook to be seen as causing problems for only non-English-
speaking HIV support groups, right?), additional overhead to track,
potentially stepping on the toes of the design team that maintains the mockups
for that admin interface. It would need to be someone's passion project, and
even that might not be enough. And perhaps the people at Facebook who know the
problem firsthand from being in AA or HIV support groups don't want to draw
attention to why they're justifying this feature, for obvious reasons.

This is why we can't have nice things.

------
code_duck
“For example, according to Lewis, the algorithm might keep showing a post
whose question has been answered. And it might deprioritize posts from new
members that don’t get much engagement—ensuring they get even less engagement
in a form of algorithmic ghosting.”

Essentially the flaw with facebook’s entire system of selecting posts. When I
recently posted on Facebook to my 2000 friends, the only people to react were
mother and aunt. I am actually not that much of a loser, but you’d never know
from my Facebook page.

FB have made Instagram the same way and I spent days looking at posts my
friends made 4 days ago while not seeing their newest posts (this is
especially annoying at conventions). I have a hard time believing that
Facebook actually pays hundreds of engineers above market salaries to realize
this sad customer abuse. It’s a serious waste of the potential of the
Internet.

As far of the rest of the article, yes, Facebook has taken over the
independent web forum. And yes, their software is inadequate (the usual total
lack of features or confusing UI) but their reach is incomparable.

~~~
bcherny
How would you adjust the algorithm? Maybe surface new posts with some degree
of stochasticity, like what HN does? Sorting by Hot on Reddit feels pretty
similar to FB, and sorting strictly chronologically doesn't scale (just sort
by New on HN or Reddit - most posts just aren't very interesting to most
people).

~~~
code_duck
It’s complex and difficult to say since the algorithm is secret. I could list
flaws or ways I think it should work differently.

I think it’s been tainted by FB’s business models. I will check back when I
have more time to write.

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drngdds
I feel like having to use your real name and identity and hope that Facebook
doesn't fuck up is a really bad requirement for secret support groups.

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new_guy
Facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world. You could replace
'emotional support' with anything and it'd be full of those groups.

~~~
liftbigweights
Sure, but then what would "journalists" at theatlantic have to write about?

Journalism today is all about writing nonsense and throwing on Facebook,
Google or Trump on the headline for views.

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village-idiot
Anecdote, but it sure seems to me that the need for emotional support groups
has skyrocketed within my lifetime. I’m sure all the members of these groups
are legitimate (I’m not making a “snowflake” argument) but what in the hell is
going on?

~~~
dbattaglia
Has the need really skyrocketed though? Or has the use of them just become
more normalized (and perhaps more convenient thanks to the internet), and less
people feel the need to just "suck it up" and deal with their problems alone?

~~~
emiliobumachar
Yeah, my stereotype of the distant past which I didn't live in - say, up to
the 1980's - is that it was considered uncool to talk about your problems to
strangers in a constructive way.

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perpetualcrayon
Maybe I'm just too paranoid, but first thing that popped into my head is there
are a lot of predators out there looking for weak prey. Maybe I need a support
group to help with that :)

~~~
darpa_escapee
There are. Predators use domestic violence, sexual abuse and other abuse-
related online support groups to groom vulnerable people. Strict moderation is
absolutely necessary in these communities.

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rebornshellfish
Secrets are a pre-21st century idea.

