This appeared last week:
Zuckerberg’s Facebook the digital Frankenstein feeding on hate, rage
11:00PM October 17, 2021
Like Dr Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, Mark Zuckerberg has created a monster he cannot control. The recent revelations of The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files and testimony before US congress of product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen, appear to have removed any doubt regarding the extent of Facebook’s unwieldy problems, and the lack of willingness on behalf of its leadership to deal with them.
Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder, chief executive and president of Facebook. Yet the most recent revelations about the failures of his company suggest he has lost control of the product he created in a dorm room 17 years ago. Despite being a trillion-dollar company, whistleblowers and investigative journalists have exposed how Facebook is unable to prevent people being bought and sold as slaves on its platform, or prevent people from selling subplots of the Amazon rainforest to land speculators. Facebook’s executives have even been unable to stop the platform from being used to incite genocide, as it was in Myanmar in 2018.
But what is it about Facebook’s platform that makes it so monstrous? On the face of it its mission sounds innocuous. “Facebook was built to bring people closer together and build relationships,” Zuckerberg has written in a company mission statement. How could such a mission turn awry? Isn’t bringing people “closer together” an unalloyed good?
In theory, yes. But in reality, what Facebook and its algorithms do is catalyse sectarian divisions by bolstering in-group identity while promoting out-group hate. Nothing brings people “closer together” than hating a common enemy. And, importantly, this is not a process that impugns any particular side of the political spectrum. As each side is brought “closer together”, the further they pull away from each other. In the US context, social media propels the Black Lives Matter and transgender activist movements on the left and the Stop the Steal and anti-vaccination movements on the right. What these movements have in common is that they all rely on tribal solidarity animated by social grievance.
On the WSJ’s podcast, Frances Haugen describes some of the content Facebook knew was going viral on its platform in countries it knew were “at risk” of ethnic violence:
“It’s just horrific content. It’s severed heads. It’s horrible. One of the red flags for a society that is at risk for ethnic cleansing is you start comparing people to insects. This ethnic group is cockroaches because it dehumanises them so you can then kill them. Imagine you’re going to this meeting every other week and every single post is like that, and you’re talking about what allowed this post to go viral, what are the signals that were causing it to go viral? And you’re sitting there being like, ‘I am the civic misinformation PM (product manager), and I am seeing this misinformation and I feel no faith that I can do anything to address it’. Imagine living with that every day and having that just grind you down?”
Before Haugen left Facebook and turned whistleblower, senior-level data scientist Jeff Allen leaked an internal report on misinformation to the MIT Technology Review. Allen was concerned about the number of Facebook pages being operated by bad actors, describing the problem as “not normal, not healthy”.
The report Allen leaked (but did not author) revealed that 19 of the top 20 Facebook pages for Christian Americans were operated by troll farms in Eastern Europe. Similarly, 10 of the top 15 pages for African-Americans were also run by international troll farms. Allen’s report estimated that these troll accounts were reaching an estimated 140 million Americans, and 360 million people globally, including in Australia. In response to this report, Allen wrote: “Our platform has given the largest voice in the Christian American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never been to church … Our platform has given the largest voice in the African-American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never had an interaction with an African-American.”
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Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.
Much more here:
Well said Claire!
Evidence of further malevolence just continues to roll in. See here for example.
‘Focus on the good’: Fresh whistleblower claims Facebook let hate, criminal activity to go unchecked
By Craig Timberg
October 23, 2021 — 11.47am
A new whistleblower affidavit submitted by a former Facebook employee on Friday (Saturday AEDT) alleges that the company prizes growth and profits over combatting hate speech, misinformation and other threats to the public, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.
The whistleblower’s allegations, which were declared under penalty of perjury and shared with The Post on the condition of anonymity, echoed many of those made by Frances Haugen, another former Facebook employee whose scathing testimony before Congress this month intensified bipartisan calls for federal action against the company.
Haugen, like the new whistleblower, also made allegations to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees publicly traded companies.
The new whistleblower is a former member of Facebook’s Integrity team whose identity is known to The Post and who agreed to be interviewed about the issues raised in the legal filing. Perhaps the most vivid moment in the affidavit comes in a direct quote the whistleblower reported hearing from a top Facebook communications official during the controversy following Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The whistleblower’s name is redacted in the affidavit.
As the company sought to quell the political controversy during a critical period in 2017, Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds allegedly said, according to the affidavit, “It will be a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.”
Much more here:
To me the only way the harm can be wound back is to modify the feed algorithms to seek out diversity and truth an not falsity and provocation. The temperature needs to be drastically lowered for all our sakes!
Not that I have any hope that change will happen but it is surely needed. Back to Digital Health!
David.
The emerging meta verse will make all the current concerns evaporate. If one lesson has been learned by Zuckerberg through his dealings with government types - is that to deflect and defer - rebrand or come up with something shiny.
ReplyDeleteAnd the intrusiveness will start with the buying up a health and well-being apps, specifically fitness apps, that data is pure gold and opens up a whole new landscape of trouble for you and I.
ReplyDelete@Sarah Conner - shame on you Sarah, don’t you know the meta verse is going to be a game changer in healthcare, with the My Health Record (or meta-health-record) front a centre as the interoperability enabler, delivering something somewhere to someone without you knowing.
ReplyDelete@Jane the thing is you are probably correct. I can visualise the number of thought leaders, focus groups, paid-to-be advocates and closed door community consultations being planned.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who uses the term "thought leader" is talking through their nether regions. Especially on the subject of IT in healthcare.
ReplyDelete