Unrelated anecdote, I once worked in an office where the light switches were powered by the cloud. If you pressed the on and off button at the same time, there would be some sort of a race condition and you'd get blinking disco lighting as two threads presumably went
while (!bright) {
increaseBrightnessBy10%();
sleep(100ms);
}
and
while (!dark) {
decreaseBrightnessBy10%();
sleep(100ms);
}
Then someone had to log into a server and reboot a process before the blinking stopped.
This is true and surprised me. Even with 100K employees and a separate 4096bit RSA key per badge that is only 50MiB of data. You would think that they would preload the readers with the access list or at least have a copy on site.
Of course it isn't a no-brainer:
- It is still a non-trivial amount of data for an embedded device.
- You want to be able to revoke quickly.
- You still want to log the access if offline (and how big should that buffer be?).
I'm surprised they haven't pushed ranges to datacenters located near the last access.
You could maintain strong consistency while having fast local reads, once you have entered a building in a country it pulls you into the local range. So you're only slow when switching.
The parent comment above wasn't about DNS, it was about using a centralized authorization mechanism where each check needed to travel from the EU to the United States in order to approve/deny a badge check.
Networked (as they are now) but with a complete local cache seems pretty straightforward. If you've already got an embedded device doing network requests, it's not much of a stretch to stick in a 1GB SD card or whatever.
There is a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a person's badge access, so you can't cache the data. It has to check every time.
You could set the system up to push data out to all of the badge readers whenever there is a change, but that's a big messy operation. A more complex but probably workable solution is to have them readers cache the data but also have the server maintain a list of those caches, and when someone is changed you invalidate all of the readers that the person used within the last cache timeout period. Even then it is still messy, if a reader has temporarily lost network connectivity their cache could be out of sync. It's one of those problems that gets really hairy once you're down in the weeds working out the details.
Any office that uses physical keys will fail to meet this requirement, and we've had that system for quite a long time and it seems to have worked alright.
> There is a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a person's badge access, so you can't cache the data. It has to check every time.
Luckily this isn't a pure IT system, but bound to physical bodies moving around. Some delay is acceptable. Most likely the person is already in anyways.
> You could maintain a local cache which is updated less frequently and a blacklist which gets pushed everywhere when updated.
That seems like the system GP just described, including the hairiness you can get into.
> Why is it a requirement to be able to instantly revoke a person's badge access everywhere in real time anyway?
With 140,000 employees and hundreds of locations across the globe it becomes a question of dealing with hundreds of local databases and dealing with people that need to be in more than 1 or 1 central database (be it truly centralized or cache coherent).
Also think beyond the "you're fired and standing right in front of me" use case of revocation for why it's a requirement it be instant. A lost/stolen/replicated card can have traveled the world in the time it takes to be realized compromised.
Turns out that the risk of an employee fired 1 minute ago running full speed, jumping walls and somersaulting into a now-restricted area is a way lower than locking out whole divisions due to network failure.
And I can't imagine why would anyone think otherwise.
And yet this is the requirement. Some companies will also have security show up when it is time to fire someone so they can be escorted directly out of the building.
And that's something that you can implement without creating a huge single point of failure. This was pure hubris, whether it emanated from engineering or elsewhere.
Of course, if the employee was indeed a ninja, your guards wouldn't be able to do much, but in all other cases, it will suffice.
We all derided the company that made "smart" pet feeders that wouldn't maintain a cache of the feeding schedule, but rather phone home to check; when their servers were down, pets went without food. It's not difficult to think of an scenario like this.
That should not be the case. Any existing user should be in the local cache. Most companies will have a controller in some control room somewhere which manages the door readers. New users yes. Former users should also need a connection. But existing users should not need a round-trip ping.
At what point is this an occupational safety hazard akin to blocking a fire door? Ridiculous that something like access to a building requires a network at all, but leave it to technology companies to overengineer a solution and underthink about the implications.
Exit from a building is usually not limited by access control. Either there's a button near the door on the inside which releases the door (cutting the current to the maglock, or energizing the solenoid, or even mechanically releasing the latch), or there's an "emergency use only" fire exit nearby with a crash bar which opens only from the inside (and triggers an alarm when opened), or both. So no, slow badge readers are usually not going to be a safety hazard similar to blocking a fire door.
Upcoming tweet: "Smoke could be seeen at FB data center, but employees said it's nothing to worry about, it's a workaround to get the fire alarm to trigger and override all doors to open.".
Exiting a space is always possible by using a request to exit button/sensor or crash bar. Fire codes do not allow for Triangle Shirtwaist situations anymore.
To reconfigure misconfigured routers one needs physical access -> routers are in a high-security area of a secure DC -> physical access systems do not let anyone in due to network outage.
I worked at eBay many years ago. At the time, the process to get into the datacenter involved multiple ID checks by both humans and computers and multiple authentication factors. The process took about 10 minutes from walking in the front door to actually being in the cage.
One day we had a major outage. The first few engineers to arrive were started on the 10 minute process. As more engineers arrived, a line started to form out the door. Then the VP showed up. He told the poor security guard that if they didn't open all the doors right now, eBay would find a new datacenter (we were probably more than 1/2 the space at the time).
They used the emergency fire release to just unlock all the doors at once, and then called the fire department and told them to ignore the alarm. So now all the doors were open and if there were a fire no one would come.
That day, if you happen to know where the eBay datacenter was, you could just walk right in. The only check against it was that most of use who had DC access knew everyone else who did and could call out imposters, but you'd have to stop what you were doing and think about it first.
The point is, there is always a way to avoid security when needed.
I wonder how many of the customers colocated in the other half of the datacenter decided to leave or seek compensation when they found that that the datacenter didn't have the physical security that they were promised.
I'm pretty surprised that anyone was on-site that was authorized to make a snap decision that affects contracts with every customer colocated there.
Well the front desk security guard probably didn't have the authority but got bullied into using the emergency fire system (which everyone has access to for safety reasons) to open all the doors.
I don't remember what happened with the other customers. They were all in a single shared cage, so it's possible they just locked that cage back up. Or they just didn't know. Usually the datacenter was pretty empty -- even then you didn't really go all that often.
If the front desk security guard made that decision on his own, I hope he got fired for it since his one job is to keep unauthorized people out of the data center.
And now other customers have to declare a security incident to their customers because the rock solid physical security that they promised was breached because someone bullied the security guard into opening the doors and letting everyone in without so much as looking at an ID.
There are lots of ways to speed entry of a group of people without throwing open all of the egress doors, like checking ID's (or letting the eBay exec identify his employees) and letting 10 of them at a time in the man trap before opening the other door.
Don't be so sure
>letting 10 of them at a time in the man trap before opening the other door
The man trap I've used in a data center was a cylinder that allowed only one person in. Think the new security machine in the airport where it goes back and forth around you, EXCEPT it's about a third of the area.
Really really small.
The first rule of netops is to have a separate, externally accessible, not controlled by the managed routers network of serial consoles with the entry points connected to IP over LTE or completely dedicated network of a different provider.
...and discover that the POTS into the modem in Finland is flaky so you can't dial-in in from the US.
...and the OOB network access requires a smartcard that's kept in a safe... and the safe's combination is in the secrets tool that requires network access.
...and then you cry.
(for sanity's sake: NOT referring to today's FB outage. Don't quote me)
I'm just saying we have been doing this for decades using KISS principal. It is not sexy and we dont write fancy blog posts about our super smart BGP software that we wrote, but it worked. We had outages. Nasty, nasty outages, where the long distance fiber was down and we got our network partitioned and our neteng was not able to get into the routers via standard means but our OOB worked... because it was dumb and dumb allowed us to recover from really bad problems within 10-15 minutes.
And of course you test your OOB weekly to make sure every device in every POP is accessible all the time, automatically and systematically, right?
Otherwise, Murphy's Law ensures that when you desperately need to access the peering router in 60 Hudson, or Equinix Chicago, or 1 Wilshire to fix an outage, that will be the modem that doesn't answer the phone, or the console cable that got pinched in a door.
> And of course you test your OOB weekly to make sure every device in every POP is accessible all the time, automatically and systematically, right?
If you don't spend the time writing a super-duper BGP implementation using sexy Rust rather than dealing with boring Cisco and Juniper boxes supporting all kinds of orchestration that gets you onto front page of Hacker News, you can get a set of Expect scripts running against serial consoles 24x7 triggering notifications of OOB failures within minutes.
The first rule of systems administration is don’t do anything you can’t back out of. This is just a derivative rule that happens when risk management goes wrong, eg if nobody noticed, it didn’t happen. Sort of a weak invariant principle…
Isn’t the answer here if you can’t get someone with keys in a reasonable amount of time to break a window? Most doors have windows adjacent to them, and the company can just call the security people and tell them it’s part of DR.
Any secured area isn’t going to have easily broken windows, but there’s also no such thing as an intrusion proof building. Ultimately the main point of any security system is to slow down an attacker before people with guns show up and pointedly ask you to stop doing that. If it’s your building, you can use a blowtorch to get in if you need to, it just won’t be as fast as say, breaking into a residential home.
My company is not Facebook, but in our data center there are no windows and the doors and walls in specific areas are designed to hold off physical attacks.
What I wonder if this isn’t a scheme on Facebook part to show the world what it feels like without it. At first you might think it’ll “wake up” the addicts and whatnot but you can’t just cut off an addict from their supply and expect them to just be ok with it. Instead they’ll relapse harder without help and might dig in deeper, never wanting to feel the withdraw again. I wonder if there’s a phenomenon called Social Withdrawn Symptoms.
Seems odd. There is NO ONE that can let people in? Every building I've worked in has required badges, but there's always security inside that can check IDs and let people in. And methods of security getting in even if there's a power failure.
The local readers should have a cache of all known active badges as of their last update (whatever their cycle is). It's not supposed to require a live connection to auth people in, as far as I know.
That's not the way a security system should work, it should "fail secure" and not let anyone in that it can't verify 100%. There are lots of reasons to lock all of the doors, or even lock out a single person. And, since such systems can fail frequently, there always needs to be a backup plan in place, almost always involving humans.
If it didn't go to server for every swipe then that window of opportunity would exist. i.e. the time where server revoked the badge abd the device/cache considers it valid.
Even a few minutes could be risky with an ex-employee who knows what he is doing.
There are InfoSec reasons why some companies will revoke access as soon or even before telling an employee he is being let go and Security escort the employee off premise. While it is very poor way to handle human relations, it is sound from InfoSec perspective.
You are right, as you point out not all perimeters are same, typically more sensitive areas have lesser exceptions though a security guard will not be able to swipe/override you in to a DC as he would in normal office building.
Someone else mentioned that they had to trigger Fire Alarms to get all the engineers they needed fast enough at a DC during a down time at eBay.
The current system seems to prioritize de-activation of employee badges versus ease of use for existing employees. A local cache would need an invalidation mechanism that was networked.
"Well, actually", as someone who has religiously avoided Facebook services for almost 15 years... I'd happily join FB if Zuck turned out to be an alien!
I would say this is a bit misleading. Personally, I was able to access my FB building this morning (after the outage started) and have continued to be able to use my badge with no problem since. Not saying that there are no employees experiencing this issue, but it is not affecting all Facebook employees.
Honestly having buildings automatically lock down like this sounds like an absolute worst practice. FB headquarters is in california. What happens when the big one hits? server is killed and no one can get inside and look for survivors? Shouldn't need a functional network connection to be able to open the door of a building, but here we are I guess.
The fact that almost all industries have some level of ethical problems does not mean that there aren't worse industries than the rest, or that you should somehow take no moral responsibility in choosing a job.
>does not mean that there aren't worse industries than the rest, or that you should somehow take no moral responsibility in choosing a job.
Only person suggestion that was you. In fact if you say, "well my job isn't as bad as Facebook," well then you're ignoring or passing the ethical dilemmas in your own industry, aren't you? Facebook isn't a free pass to ignore everything else. That's like saying, "well Stalin was pretty bad and we aren't as bad as Stalin, so we're probably ok." Not ok. It's really easy to justify working in immoral industries. I would wager that in the US, you have to do it just to put food on the table.
Sure, you're putting small and medium sized farmers out of their homes / farms and contributing to mega-farms. Anyone who can't afford your product will not be able to compete and lose their homes / farms. The way that works is the more efficient farming is, the more land required to live off of. Land is the expensive part. It used to be 40 acres and a mule could get you and your family by, now it's probably 500 acres just to make a decent living due to efficiency in automation. 500 acres of good farmland costs in the millions. It's not like quality food is getting cheaper either, that profit goes into the pockets of the automaters and the mega farmers and middle men mostly. All he food everyone else eats is loaded with fake sugar (high fructose corn syrup) to make it addictive, but its nutritionally garbage. People sure buy it though, because it's addictive.
Also, there's a lot of suicide as a result of that farming efficiency with small / medium farmers. When they can't run their farms effectively because they can't afford the automation or acreage it requires, they off themselves out of shame, leaving their families to pick up the pieces. Don't feel too bad though, you're just at the end of the line of something that's being going on since the 1920s. It really picked up in the 1980s with computerization though.
Doesn't the Agricultural industry have one of the highest mortality rates?
Grain handling, everything from gases in an enclosed space to being buried alive by a quicksand like effect.
Do you ask for consent before all this handling and cleaning? You know, consent from the grain.
Ok but seriously, the best I can imagine might be a generic environmental impact concern that could be levelled far and wide. Honestly seems pretty legit. Are there any ethical issues we should know about in the field of agricultural grain handling?
I can't really think of anything directly immoral about the business I participate in. Anything that could be pointed as an ethical grey area is more like a side-effect of the capitalist society we exist within.
So maybe more specifically, I'm not working with the farmers directly. I'm working with the businesses buying and selling the grain. The "capitalism grey areas" fall into effect when a farmer signs a contract saying they're going to deliver "Wheat" at a "Grade 2" spec and show up to the elevator with a truck full of wheat. It goes through the grading specs and even though that farmer brought them a "Grade 1" they're only getting paid at a Grade 2 rate.
So the grain elevator itself grabs that top quality stuff, shoves it in a silo with the other top quality stuff and sends the farmer away. They sell that grain at a Grade 1 and make immense profit that is never realized by the farmer who did the work.
It gets fishier the further into it you go. Because a "Grade 1" spec implies certain qualities in the grain: protein, moisture, dockage, etc. etc etc. So if the elevator needs to sell a Grade 2 product, the grading is taken as a sample and likely averaged over the entire load. They can take 10% of that Grade 1 stuff, shove it into a bunch of Grade 3 stuff and sell it as a Grade 2... the blending is where they make their money.
Then it gets even worse, because a grain terminal filling a vessel for export would sign off on a load that contains up to 1% dockage, but after the product in the silos is cleaned its likely to have <0.1% dockage or whatever anyway. So what is the terminal going to do? Surely they don't give the customer free "good" product right? Nope, they fill that vessel 99.5% full of product, then shove worthless garbage in to hit the 0.5% remainder and ship it out. So a vessel with 20,000MT of Soybean likely contains a bunch of garbage wheat or chaff or whatever else they have on hand that can't be sold.
It gets absurd to think they take in those Soybeans, then run them through the clean systems to remove the garbage, but then when it comes time to fill the vessel, they just put all the garbage back in so the customer has to clean it again.
Do your control systems enable producers of GMO grain to handle and clean their grain with greater efficiency? Then you’re contributing to the GMO problem :)
Agricultural automation is part of why Uyghur slavery is so profitable (similar to how the cotton gin led to a revitalization of slavery in the US- with a modicum of training, a single slaves productivity was drastically increased)
Closer to home, assuming you're in the US, the glut of cheap corn syrup plays a big role in our obesity epidemic (especially in underprivileged communities). Obesity and related issues are some of the top killers in the US.
Legaltech - namely, automating the legal process behind startup funding rounds. We have lawyers on staff to help if needed, but we automate 95% of the work.
Sure, you are automating away the jobs of lawyers and paralegals and secretaries, janitors, marketing people, sales people, etc. Most automation jobs have ethical problems in that, if successful, they permanently remove jobs from the job market. I should know, automation is what I do, but a different industry. Also, I'm sure if the lawyers on staff make good money, as good as private industry, they certainly won't in about 5-10 years after automation has taken over. So basically you're helping to put thousands of lawyers who spent $200k in degrees to specialize in startup legal work out of work, plus all their support staff they would ordinarily hire and give benefits (healthcare/retirement) to and the families those employees support.
Facebook cannot be compared to any other industry. Facebook's ethical problems is not about the services they provide, it is about the quantity of data collected with consent(ignorance). I hope everyone working inside is ethical as believed by the upper management.
>Facebook cannot be compared to any other industry.
As far as ethics? As deplorable as Facebook is, there are way worse industries. The defense industry just made trillions murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years for starters, and that's trillions from middle and lower class Americans and the sons and daughters too. I think someone calculated that Afghanistan alone cost $300 million a year for 20 years. That's alot of money taken away from the betterment of the country: schools, safety nets, infrastructure, a lot of things that were neglected. The incarceration industry also comes to mind. I'm sure I can think of others if you asked.
I'm not even sure that's an industry, but in the US, a surprisingly large number of charities take up to a 90% administration fee. If that's your industry, you probably aren't doing a very good job if those sort of things exist. I wish you luck though, it's a friggin travesty that a 90% administration fee is even legal.
This isn't how badge readers work. Every controlled door is wired to a relay panel. That panel connects to a access control db - but it always maintains a cache that is very slow to expire... because the manufacturers weren't clueless morons.
Except some of the readers were made in house. I’ve never been into a Facebook conference room that didn’t use one of their custom touch screen/ card readers.
That isn't access control, that is a an intern project. Those readers aren't wired to devices that could trap you in a burning building, they simply provide a rube goldberg solution to the traditional sign-in sheet.
> Every controlled door is wired to a relay panel. That panel connects to a access control db
Absolutely not. E.g. HID is a well-documented protocol and you can do whatever you want using the RS232 interface they come with (depending on the model). I personally wrote a gateway that would dynamically and directly check the access with my own software.
Agreed. The theoretical fat-fingering SRE who stopped all access to FB has probably done more to benefit humanity than any other single engineer in recent memory.
Many pockets of humanity are materially worse off today because of these outages. The (perhaps sad) reality is that tens of thousands of small businesses are completely dependent on WhatsApp and Instagram, especially in developing countries. This outage will cause lots of lost business by people who don't have massive cash reserves to ride out the lost revenue, unlike Facebook itself.
Those businesses should have never depended on Facebook to begin with, if anything the fact that what you describe is a reality is a testimony of the degree at which Facebook is a cancer to be expunged.
Jesus man! We’ve lockdown some business for months, they are back, they found alternatives like delivery and you’re telling me that one day without WhatsApp or Facebook is going to be a tragedy?
Businesses which rely on Facebook, as their sole distribution channel could get out of business if Facebook goes out. A lot of economical value will be lost.
Many of these businesses are small single-person operations with little tech understanding that are using, for example, FB marketplace. They wouldn't even know what you meant by "single point of failure."
Allowing copyrights to expire on pre-1950 creative works would also destroy billions of dollars of "economic value", but that doesn't mean it would be bad for humanity.
We should be careful to not take our values from a spreadsheet.
Would these be the same developing countries where Facebook has helped facilitate genocide?
Seriously though, is the net utility of Facebook even positive there? It’s not like those businesses couldn’t interact with their customers over literally any other medium.
You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the primary communication method for large parts of the globe. The world might be better off if we transitioned off them, but having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely won't make the world better off.
> You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the primary communication method for large parts of the globe.
I wish regulators would have though that before allowing the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook. That both of the main messaging apps are down at the same time is worrisome.
That article is from 2012. Admittedly a lot of people moved off for the pricing reasons but essentially everyone I communicate with in the US uses SMS/iMessage today.
That seems to be a US-specific oddity. My German mobile plan still charges per SMS (a few cents per message), and apart from verification codes or delivery notices, I never receive any SMS at all. No one uses them for personal communication over here, to the point where people don't know how to send them and I wouldn't know of another country apart from the US where SMS are still widely used.
I'm French and SMS are ubiquitous here; sometimes even more so than email. All operators offer unlimited free SMS, even the cheapest 2€/month subscriptions. I'm not sure I personally know anyone who uses WhatsApp.
SMS used to be priced like you describe until a new operator (aptly named "Free") entered the market in 2012 with free SMS plans and forced the other three operators to align.
Whatsapp is (and especially was) way better at sending photos than whatever SMS app installed on one's phone. It also used to work with crappier phones, for which there was no easy way (that I know of) of installing a SMS app that would send photos. Plus, you have Whatsapp private groups, which I don't know if you can emulate using SMS.
I use Gchat at work as essentially an adjunct to Gmail. I don't even have any of the other apps installed. I do use Facebook Messenger for one good friend who lives in Europe.
But, in general TBH, I don't use texting all that much day to day.
With all of the zeal only a young adult can muster, I hated the first people to tell me that they knew about problems and waited for them to break before doing anything.
I get no credit for fixing things before they break, and sometimes it's shown up negatively on an annual review. If you have to cajole people to help you start to look pushy, or worst case like a bully. I've heard back from two former employers that the moment I left some manager tried to roll back things I did and be surprised when it turned out that the developers wanted to keep things the way they were.
You can see the lights go on for people in the trenches when some bit of software or step saves them from turning a 2 alarm fire into a 5 alarm fire, but the managers don't notice that non-verbal communication, and maybe half the time does someone editorialize the experience for all of the non-technical people (If I do it, it sounds like "I told you so" so I usually don't).
More likely it’ll be fixed by tomorrow and everyone will forget about it by next week.
Rare problems aren’t enough to disrupt entrenched systems. It will take users suffering some recurring pain to motivate them to move to another network.
We can both recognize that this effects a lot of people and recognize that it could be a good thing for the long run. WA has a lock-in effect that is difficult for competitors to fight against. An outage like this can help bring competition simply because people may no longer be so reliant upon a single app. Simply having a second app for "backup" helps reduce the lock-in. This should always be the response to "I don't want to install a billion apps"
> having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely won't make the world better off.
It may indirectly, in that it may spur a transition to another platform. Most likely, that platform will also be a privacy-invading centralized service, but in an ideal world it would be something like XMPP, Matrix, etc.
People would be using telegram or signal for business in less than one day.
Nobody would ever think about WhatsApp in one month. People that uses Facebook as their photo album would be pissed with losing some old photos taken with digital point and shoot cameras.
Stalkers of former boyfriends and girlfriends would be inconsolable for a few weeks but then move on and be better with it.
There would be a great cultural loss in the disappearance of some groups and even some profiles of very interesting people. But they would resurface, in blogs, telegram channels, forums and whatever else appeared to fill the vacuum.
Nobody misses myspace.
Nobody would miss Facebook.
And eventually Facebook will disappear.
The Internet is the primary communication for large parts of the globe. If we let Facebook use this excuse that they are the Internet (which is sadly very true for poorer parts of the world where a smartphone is the only computer accessible), they must be regulated like a telecom provider.
But it does. People need to learn to have fallbacks and backups, and the vast majority of them is only willing to learn this the hard way - see backups vs. losing something important.
It's not that easy. Installing another messenger is easy, but you need to migrate your contacts to it as well. If you've been communicating through Facebook Messenger and don't have their phone number, you're shit out of luck. With WhatsApp you're somewhat better off since it uses phone numbers as user identifiers, so you at least have everyone's number, but international texting is incredibly unreliable and international calling is prohibitively expensive for lots of people.
In some parts of the world feature phones and some smartphones are pocket WhatsApp devices. Free data if you're using FB and WhatsApp, with phone calls and SMS also covered (but that doesn't help much with international communication, international SMS is even more unreliable than domestic SMS). It's not that they'll need a new device, they'll need a new service plan that costs more money.
My country had something like this when Facebook Zero was around but the telcos regulator ordered it off as it was a violation to net neutrality. And iirc, the same happened in India and other places where this was implemented.
Everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. It would be a mild inconvenience to switch to Telegram or Signal.
And I'm afraid I'm not naive enough to think that other companies wouldn't turn to the Dark Side.
All of Silicon Valley, perhaps all of the tech industry is evil.
Unfortunately, I'm not given the option about whether I interact with Facebook.
Their aggressive insinuation into the fabric of most websites ensures that there are very few places I can go without Mark Zuckerberg personally stalking me, along with a legion of inhuman advertisers.
Facebook and its sites can't stay down long enough; if they were offline forever, it wouldn't be enough. Even if this doesn't affect their advertising services, any hit to the FB ecosystem is a societal good.
Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political content that is commonly disinformation because it increases engagement. Yes, people are creating and sharing the disinformation, but facebook itself is choosing to rank that content highly.
So Facebook facilitates the spread of engaging content which happens to include disinformation because due to our imperfect nature people like to engage with disinformation.
Seems like wishing that Facebook wouldn't exist because of this is analogous to wishing that airfare wouldn't exist because it facilitates global spread of infections.
Also, the word "divisive" gives me shivers. It's better to be divided than to be united in a fallacy. And in many cases getting divided is our only hope of ever arriving at the truth.
It's not the divisiveness that upsets me, I agree with "And in many cases getting divided is our only hope of ever arriving at the truth." It's the fact that facebook is propagandizing people because it's shoving the divisive content in their face nonstop without understanding if it's disinformation first.
There will always be false content on social media, but I don't think that means facebook gets a pass for actively encouraging it.
It is not merely "happens to include disinformation"
It is systematic, algorithmic preferential amplification of disinformation (at the expense of real information) based on 'engagement' vs truth value, moral compass, or societal value.
And it is allowing orgs like Cambridge Analytica to harvest vast amounts of PII and use that to specifically tune and target the dezinformatsiya.
If you think of Fb as some kind of passive carrier you are horribly outdated - it hasn't done that in decades. FB curates and manages every word of data coming across it's servers at a scale and effectiveness that no actual news organization has evrer conceived of, let alone implemented. And yet they hide behind the "we're only a carrier" fallacy.
It's like the fat epidemic - sure, you can blame each bite of what to eat on the individual, but the rapidity of the overall trend makes in undeniable that the entire food supply has been skewed, limiting the choices such that only those who work diligently to avoid all the usual choices typically remain healthy.
well not just mary-sue down the road disinforming but that of nation level actors doing so to spread discord to the detriment of their enemies. facebook amplified the velocity and reach of this disinformation.
I don't really get the Facebook hate, how are people ending up with such "terrible" stuff on their news feed?
I haven't really changed my default settings and all I see are posts from my friends, the same ads over and over again, and posts from my groups (recipes, potlucks, language practice meetups, going to museums, rooms for rent, questions from expats).
There's absolutely nothing that could "radicalize" me. If you add garbage to your RSS feed reader I wouldn't blame the software, I would blame the person.
Not everyone is subject to compromise via news feed. One of the interesting things about the Cambridge Analytica story was the idea that they got good at finding people vulnerable to radicalization via news feed.
As for the reason for the hate, well, we have to deal with the radicalized people here in meatspace. It's a negative externality that we are subject to even if we aren't the target of the advertising.
I don't get so much 'terrible' stuff, I deleted my account but re-signed up for a local cause.
After ignoring "region to the West of me" local news, I've had to delete about 40 other regions spanning farther outwards. FB keep pushing more data for you to interact with which in itself is not exactly healthy.
And it's easy to say ignore it, the simple fact it's in front of me, in the part of the screen where I'm reading new information is the problem.
It's not radicalising, it's just an absolute time and life suck. If it weren't for COVID and lockdown I'm sure my local cause would prefer not to use Facebook.
I don't think I am exagerating on saying that the best thing that happened to humanity in the 21st century is Facebook's very naive way of doing things: it showed to some what is possible to do with technology. Unfortunatelly, for the vast majority of the "tech savy" wannabe crowd, the lesson they learned stopped at "Facebook is bad, mkay?" and since this is all they know, this is all they talk about.
> how are people ending up with such "terrible" stuff on their news feed?
Because their FB friends post it, or the groups they are in post it, and they interact with it (even if to say "stop posting this crap" to their family members).
I used to see it a lot, then I unfollowed (but stayed "friends") with the family members who posted that crap or marked the content "don't show me this" and now I rarely see it.
I had a friend from high school who posted too much political stuff (nothing outrageous, I am just very apathetic) so I unfollowed him because it's not what I want to see. It's like unsubscribing from a channel because they're boring.
I suppose that commenting or arguing with him would have the algorithm look at the words used, see that there is more interaction than normal, and promote posts from strangers that also contain those words? That's certainly how I would have designed the news feed algorithm.
So is a problem then that the algorithm can't distinguish between good interactions and bad interactions? (If it were me and I could parse comments with emotional intent to determine what are bad interactions, then I would try to learn from those bad interactions and minimize them)
If so then the duct tape fix is to just unfollow rather than let the algorithm think you're interested in that type of content. The proper fix would be to minimize bad interactions, but I guess that's where that whistleblower person is going (but that will minimize time spent on FB, minimizing revenue dun dun dun)
It's not rocket science, every user who uses YouTube and hears "comment on this video for the algorithm" knows that commenting = interaction that is perceived by the algorithm as a sign to get this seen by more people. So obviously commenting on stuff you hate will just get it seen by more people & get more stuff recommended.
It's like if I hate comedy clips and I keep clicking on each clip in order to downvote it. Of course I'll get recommended more clips.
Quite frankly I think it's the traditional media losing importance due to social media and making it look evil. The only way they can make money is by selling outrage.
How can I prove that someone has intent of doing something? You can take a look at the news revenue over the years and the efforts for getting paid for displaying headline in Google.
Well, if you had some documents showing that some folks in the news industry really didn't think social media was that bad, but they just thought it was bad for the news business, so they conspired to make social media companies look evil, then that would prove your point.
But until having something like that, you're just guessing.
i don't use it. still wish it didn't exist so my parents don't upload all my pictures onto there and their personal information, then when they hear about leaks or get their FB hijacked I'm the one dealing with it. This is before even considering all the other messed up stuff. Society is better off without it.
not sure how that is relevant analogy... but if you choose to have an outdoor cat then that's the risk you accepted. There's a reason some people choose to keep their cats indoors.
Google, Apple and Amazon, maybe. Twitter actively participates in and profits from "cancel" culture so they may as well be direct political rivals to the West.
Would you (or someone else in-the-know) help me, an out-of-the-loop person, understand why Facebook is reviled so much more intensely on this site than other social media platforms?
At least for me, a big part of my problem with Facebook is both its size and blatant ethical breaches. Obviously most large social networks are guilty of similar problems, but Facebook jump out at me as bad because of how they use information to manipulate people's emotions to increase ad revenue.
Just look at how they realized that misinformation upset people which in turn caused them to interact with the site more, so they allowed that misinformation to spread.
Facebook's algorithm prioritizes divisive political content that is commonly disinformation(propaganda) because they figured out it increases engagement.
I’m not sure it is. If this was Twitter I’m sure the reaction would be similar. Besides those two, all other social media companies are either much smaller or in a weird category where people consider them separate (I.e Reddit)
It's the political equivalent of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". It's the safest opinion you can have, so everyone will spout out without reserve because no one will challenge you on it, and if they do they're clearly just a Zuck bootlicker.
As in, "the duration of a ping to the US and back" slow.
Yep, every badge in and out in the whole office had to go cross-continental (before the door unlocked).