Interesting that Apple in April rolled out privacy prompts[1] that Facebook complained about (and tried to persuade public opinion with a full-page ad in December 2020) ... and yet it didn't seem to slow down Facebook's numbers by much:
2021-09 $28.2b revenue, $9.1b income +17%
2020-09 $21.2b revenue, $7.8b income
Possibilities:
- ads shown to iPhone FB users smaller piece of revenue pie than Android FB users
- advertisers keep spending the same amount (or more) even though they have less info because of less tracking of Apple users to correlate with dollars spent
People keep saying FB is in trouble but it doesn't matter if it's the leaked research about emotional manipulation, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or extra Apple privacy features. The revenue keeps coming in and growing. Who thinks all of today's press about the recent whistleblowers will have any effect on next year's numbers?
FB is the least likely to be hurt by Apple's move since they have their own massive number of users across multiple properties and lots of tracking on the web. If anything they might benefit by smaller players that have less access getting hurt more by Apple.
I'm not personally a fan of FB (mostly due to the ad based business model), but today's negative press will have zero affect on them - mostly because (imo) it's bullshit. A lot of the issues FB deals with are social problems at scale. It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.
If anything unseats them it'll be a technical shift that moves things to protocols 'web3'. Zuckerberg is an extremely good CEO though so I suspect he's already planning for this potential and FB's upcoming name change and structure is probably a way to accommodate this (in addition to having Oculus be a more separate entity for VR/AR and the next platform).
It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.
Nobody's going to sympathize too much with a company that brought its woes upon itself. If you can't handle moderating three billion people, don't put yourself in the position of trying to moderate three billion people.
So what are you suggesting? For Facebook to decide to just turn off the lights one day? There is evidently market for a social network like Facebook so I’m sure another would step in before too long with the same problem.
There is plenty they could do. Just today it’s been reported that Facebook themselves “have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why [hate] speech flourish[es] on the platform”[0]
FB doesn’t need to shut down, they just need to give a fuck about the safety of their users and the societies in which they live.
It’s been evident to anyone who cares to look that this has not been the case.
Limit the amount of active users until they prove they can safely run a platform of a certain size. It's like how buildings have max occupancy levels in case of fires. If a club is super popular, they don't get to cram in as many people as they can then claim "it's really hard to safely run a club with this many people, so you can't hold us accountable" whenever people are trampled to death trying to get to the exits during an emergency.
Federate. We went from walled gardens of the late 1980s and early 1990s to the federated Internet, but now we're back to walled gardens. It takes a diversity of approaches to solve the diversity of problems, and that's only really possible with separate organizations all competing to solve those problems for different niches.
How is that not what is happening right now? Would you recommend users take responsibility for being custodians of their own data? If so, how will the average user keep that data safe without resources and understanding of the threats their data face?
Facebook is a monolith with 3 billion users. Instead they could be a technology vendor helping communities of manageable sizes run their own private/public social networks with their own moderation and data privacy needs, along with other companies, federated across geographic, corporate, and community lines using standardized protocols, like the standardized international telephone system or email.
Isnt that Facebook Groups? Interoperability is part of upcoming regulations which will facilitate the standards you mention. FB is still a company, not a nationalised infrastructure.
> A lot of the issues FB deals with are social problems at scale. It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.
This is a problem that they've created at scale. In the US our closest thing to social issue moderation is probably the police (though please leave any efficacy discussion at the door) and there are 17 officers per 10k people in the US that make 67.6k/annual. Amortized per capita we expend about $114.92 for law enforcement in the real world - Facebook doesn't need a similar per-capita expenditure to keep its platform, but if you think it ends up spending more than 5 cents per user in amortized moderation costs I've got a Bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
This social issue at scale didn't exist before Facebook - it might have naturally existed over time through the popularity of platforms like Disqus and disjointed forums. But Facebook owns the problem and nurtured it into the beast we know today. The social problems are an externality of Facebook's business model which they want nothing to do with fixing - it should be treated no differently than a paper mill polluting a river.
I think all of us own the problem. Technology and progress are not going to stop, if not Facebook then some other company would have brought us here. I think connecting people is a good thing, and Facebook made the world a better place so far (just my opinion), but misinformation is becoming easier and easier with technology and it won't stop here without some innovative ideas or groundbreaking regulations.
perhaps you should do the math, 5 cents per user would be 2.81 billion * 0.05 = ~$7 million. They said in the earnings report they will spend $5 Billion this year on moderation.
> It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.
They're also making money off 3 billion people. If it costs $1/month (on average) to moderate a single person, they can afford to do that and it wouldn't even cut their profits in half.
And I think $1/month is actually high for what it would actually cost. I think for $1/month you could have US-based employees do it.
You can complain that it's a high cost, but it's certainly not impossible.
Exactly humanity is on Facebook and there are different subsets of humanity who think differently (it would be a lame world if we all thought like each other .. who'd we argue and debate with and more). Facebook needs to and always remain a neutral party where there isnt physical danger occurring or happening.
The whistleblower is backed by Pierre Omiydar's foundatoin, the founder of E-bay. So it could be a bit of one billionaire using his money to go after another.
The whistleblower is a nothing burger and she now works indirectly for Ebay cofounder. She is having her 15 minutes of fame and Im sure people who cheer her on will hire her in the future.
To me "whistleblowing" is supposed to be about revealing criminal activity.
This stuff is just hard policy challenges without any easy answers. FB is generally open about that and what they're trying to do in order to reduce risk. The problem is mostly upstream.
I'm not an apologist and FB has made mistakes (Steven Levy's book Facebook: The Inside Story is a great look into a lot of the history and it's rare in that it's actually a fair account of things). Growth at all costs (Chamath's team) lead to a lot of problems in developing countries. Incentives around engagement and controversy, etc. FB has massive teams working on reducing the risks around this stuff, but it's impossible to eliminate because most of humanity believes insane contradictory things.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Put three billion tribal apes in one place and what do you expect? HN is the best case outcome and dang does a great job, but we're a pretty selected bunch, and even then it's difficult to pull off (and we're a smaller, focused community).
We're trapped in a local maximum largely because our computing stack sucks (imo) and everything has to be a SaaS due to the extreme complexity and cost to administer anything. I hope that Urbit succeeds and we get out of this, but I don't think this is something FB can really fix - it's not even a problem anyone should be responsible for fixing. The fact things are like this is an accident of history and hopefully an anachronism of our time.
> To me "whistleblowing" is supposed to be about revealing criminal activity.
Whistleblowing has multiple descriptions. Whistleblowing, in a legal protections sense, is about revealing criminal activity. But it's frequently used to talk about bringing attention to unethical behaviors as well. Or even those that just violate norms.
The origin of the phrase, after all, relates to people violating rules in sports.
It loosely refers to decentralized applications that have some form of protocol level way to incentivize users. This is often blockchain related, but not always (Urbit isn't except for its IDs).
I took it to mean something about use of blockchain, especially but not limited to Ethereum, and "smart contracts", to create a new kind of distributed app platform. But I am not sure that's right.
>It's insane that any one company is expected to successfully moderate three billion people, they're doing the best they can with impossible constraints.
"moderate"? as far as i understand they stoke the fire. Whatever cultural wars are raging on FB, Coka vs. Pepsi, liberals vs. conservatives, FB gets engagement, ie. money, from the both sides. They are like fight cage owner - they get paid either way. And their "moderation" - just like the fight cage owner they may prevent the fighters from say using knives as it would adversely affect the quality of fight - ends too soon, etc. - and thus revenue.
I don't think giving some people special privileges that allows them to post revenge porn which ruins people's lives is the best they can do. I don't think allowing ads that they know are contributing to sex slavery is the best they can do. I definitely don't think allowing governments to organize genocide on their platform is the best they can do.
Their constraints are not impossible. They've just got to realize that their algorithm to detect rule breaking doesn't work and they need to hire minimum 100,000 moderators.
One just has to read the leaks of internal employee messages to realize that FB is clearly not doing the best they can do. Literally by admission of their own employees.
Your own examples cover a broad range of social and political issues that even the savviest state governments struggle to navigate. How could anyone possibly moderate for such delicate and complex expectations?
100,000 moderators? Perhaps our demands for censorship are what is unreasonable.
Facebook can easily afford 100,000 moderators. But that's not even the problem. Facebook knew they were causing the genocide in Myanmar. They knew they were contributing to sex slavery in Ethiopia. They decided not to solve those problems because they were concerned about the effect it would have on engagement. If they don't want to do what it takes to make their platform safe they should expect legal intervention.
Is govt doing a good job with this stuff off of facebook? I know plenty of folks who really had trouble getting even govt action on all sorts of harm (revenge porn / various internet scams).
I really hope at least govt can deliver on this stuff reliably - the risk is folks will lose faith in govt rather than these big companies (google / apple / whatsapp / instagram etc).
> advertisers keep spending the same amount (or more) even though they have less info because of less tracking of Apple users to correlate with dollars spent
Plot twist: You are the consumer, and ads are the product. Most of the data they got on you is garbage, and the algorithms they run on it have an unfalsifiable claim of usefulness.
Historically, advertising spend has been ~constant as % of GDP. It will keep being so even if they have to go back to billboards. At this point the game is how to dazzle advertisers with dashboards and graphs.
- ads shown to iPhone FB users smaller piece of revenue pie than Android FB users
- advertisers keep spending the same amount (or more) even though they have less info because of less tracking of Apple users to correlate with dollars spent
People keep saying FB is in trouble but it doesn't matter if it's the leaked research about emotional manipulation, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or extra Apple privacy features. The revenue keeps coming in and growing. Who thinks all of today's press about the recent whistleblowers will have any effect on next year's numbers?
[1] 96% of iOS users opt out of app tracking: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+apple+opt-in+privac...