How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta
theverge.comMeta is probably the only large tech company where we would be better off if they had never existed. Or, at the very least, it nothing of value would be lost.
Could have very well lived without twitter too. It's not like everyone was aching for it before it existed.
Or just social media in general. Even Mastodon is full of toxic people. There's probably something about social media style timelines that brings the worst out of people.
A faster horse, you say?
All the advantages of a single public serchable IRC channel that logs all history.
And all the obvious problems with a public serchable IRC channel that logs all history.
I think Twitter (and to a lesser degree its derivatives like bluesky, threads, etc) did far more harm than Facebook. It played a major part in ruining journalism and politics to a degree that far outshadows any other social media platform.
The comparison goes something like this:
Twitter "ruined journalism" by giving lazy media companies a way to "track big stories" (i.e. a few thousand people comment about N and that's News, apparently.)
Facebook "ruined journalism" by virtue of users not bothering to read the news at all.
Both are horrible.
But, facts, "Journalism" was ruined by corporate interests decades ago.
Absolutely not. Facebook did far more damage than Twitter ever did.
They have open sourced a lot of valuable code.
I've noticed that too. But it would have happened sooner or later by someone
And drug lords have built soccer fields for the poor and dictators made freeways and cheap cars and rockets
I'd say FBs semi open source (not fully unrestricted iirc) was less unique or inevitable that the good actions of other notable evil organizations
Oh, and Llama is pretty cool.
React would be lost, so ... yes, this take is correct.
FB Marketplace, but that's about it. Even that is a hot bed for people like bike thieves.
Messenger is nice to have a directory of everyone I've met without a translation layer into numbers or screen names.
FB marketplace is a terrible market. It does not allow exact searches. It forces scrolling hundreds of ads in the hope of finding what I need. Even Craigslist had (has?) far better searching. If you do something crazy like sort by distance half the ads disappear. It is full of scam ads (I have given up trying to buy used phones, for example). Sadly I am forced to use it because that is where all the local person-to-person selling happens.
It sounds like FB Marketplace is every bit the marketplace for scammers that people claim craigslist is.
Having never used it, how does FB Marketplace differ from eBay?
In my area, it's basically replaced newspaper classified ads. So you get people selling cars, furniture, appliances, and miscellaneous stuff that's too big or heavy to ship. Except it's more restrictive, not allowing the sale of animals for instance, which is annoying.
My main problem with it is that it doesn't obey its own filters very well. If I search for "Buick" and set a radius of 40 miles from my location, it might give me a few within that radius but then start giving me a bunch from hundreds of miles away. And it doesn't seem to work outward, but might give me some 500 miles away and then one 50 miles lower down. That makes it less useful than it could be.
It's kind of like Craigslist, targeting local sellers wanting to get rid of things quickly rather than sellers wanting to ship things whereever the highest bidder might be.
“Lost Idealism” my ass. Everyone with two brain cells knew what zuck was from square-one. Play with the devil, get burned.
To steal/paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: "Facebook started as a website to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard graduates, and it only got worse from there."
That's more of a meme though in fairness multiple things can be simultaneously true.
The original purpose was to gather data from people and map who is friends with who. A live diary so to speak. It's original name was LifeLog. Think tanks said it was too on the nose so they cancelled it and shortly thereafter Zuk was on the news announcing TheFaceBook. [1] Most of these platforms came out of and were indirectly funded by the dark side of Stanford SRI.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][44 mins][documentary]
As far as I know there was an earlier project called "Hot or Not" where Zuck and some others scraped Harvard's students roster to build.
No, Hot or Not had no connection to Zuckerberg, and no connection to Harvard. You may be thinking of Zuckerberg’s Facesmash.
It happened but it's not why Facebook was created. FB was a government project. I would call Hot or Not a side project.
That's a distinction without a difference whatsoever. It's the same man doing the same things.
Thank you LinuxBender for being a player character.
Zuck: I don't know why they trust me. Dumb f*cks
[https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu...]
Glad you reminded me of this:
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...
Well, we know what Zuckerberg's idea of "lost idealism" is with his recent rants about there not being enough "masculine energy."
these are paragraph 14 and 15 of 16; I think this is called "burying the lede."
I was surprised to see that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who has historically shied away from openly criticizing the company that made him a billionaire, endorses the book. Brooke Oberwetter, a former Facebook policy manager whose time at the company overlapped with the period Wynn-Williams writes about, also recommends it.
“I can’t fact check the whole book (and neither can anyone else), but I can say that the meetings and events I was a part of that are recounted in the book (and things that were relayed to me by others contemporaneously) are accurately represented,” she writes on LinkedIn. “Maybe more importantly, the vibe she captured is spot on. It was just all so juvenile.”
It's unfortunate that the article references several alleged errors that are fundamentally inconsequential (did people participate in Karaoke on a flight ? wtf ?) before it gets around to mentioning that a co-founder of Facebook endorses the book, that reference is three paragraphs from the end.
I found the article "Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers" interesting because it exposes the technical limitations social networks face, regardless of their comms bleating on about their being technical geniuses. For example, an internal message admits, "Our ability to detect vaccine-hesitant comments is bad in English, and basically non-existent elsewhere." This was about 2020 anti-vax comments, but it likely applies to any content in less common languages, yet this issue rarely comes up in discussions about their moderation efforts.
None of this is to deny that much of what goes on in Facebook, and the like, is primarily related to money while concern for the consumers well-being is very much secondary. It seems to me, that whatever the shortcomings of specific parts of 'Careless People' it's broad message is well worth spreading.
> it likely applies to any content in less common languages, yet this issue rarely comes up in discussions about their moderation efforts
It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives. It's certainly a huge reason they're investing in LLMs too. Politicians typically don't care about the reality and limitations of the policy they propose, and view moderation either as censorship or a jobs program.
This is also a widely understood concept, especially today with the rise of TikTok. There is an entirely new vernacular of English forming in response to automated moderation efforts (eg. "un-alive" vs "killed"/"suicide"). Internet users generally understand and are capable of learning to evade moderation by changing language usage. This is also popular in high-moderation environments like China too, where there are plenty of subtle euphemisms.
This was also one of the core issues in the "genocide caused by Facebook" in Myanmar. It was reported that during the relevant time periods, Facebook often had between 0 and 1 full time employees capable of understanding the local language and customs, but didn't want to invest in hiring moderators with knowledge of the language.
> It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives.
Thanks for your useful comments, I hadn't heard much discussion of the issue but I'm pleased someone is talking about it.
Wrt LLMs filling the gap, given non-techs rather wide-eyed view of what they can, or will, do, I'm concerned that the discourse will become one of "don't worry we've got ai on the job".
> I'm concerned that the discourse will become one of "don't worry we've got ai on the job".
There is more to the LLM research going on besides chat bots like ChatGPT. Lots of much more advanced sentiment analysis, translations, etc. Definitely not saying it's perfect, but it's better than nothing. Again with the Facebook/Myanmar example, there were posts at the time that were practically "help us kill X minority group" in the native language and Facebook was powerless without automated at-scale translation and sentiment analysis. Anything is (usually?) an improvement over nothing.
Like leet speak?
I think the last sentence of the book review hits the narrative here well:
> Ultimately, Careless People is a test for how you feel about Meta. For many, it only reaffirms the belief that the company’s leaders are ruthless, immoral capitalists. For others, it’s a hit job that bends reality to enforce a familiar narrative. I wish it challenged both sides.
As always, the author has a vested interest in promoting the book, and getting sued for spreading lies is always a sure-fire way to get attention. I have no knowledge of the actual veracity of the events in the book, but neither does anyone else, except where it goes against sworn testimony.
While I generally believe that companies like Meta would have acted ruthlessly to make money, history generally shows Meta specifically was quite ruthless. That said, I generally think poorly of people's books when they cash lucrative salaries for half a decade, only to later become critical when convenient. The author was previously a diplomat for New Zealand and the UN and the IMF (after being a law professor). She then worked as the director of public policy at Meta, and now criticizes Meta's stance on public policy for that same time period. This is clearly a high-agency individual with strong connections who worked many dream jobs already, so why she would spend years working and contributing to such an immoral place?
I agree on the part of people criticizing when convenient; I had the same thought when watching "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix.
I read Careless People, and if I was in the author's shoes and if what she says was accurate, I would've run away screaming within my first two years. The fact that she portrays herself as morally upstanding, and yet stayed so long even after seeing some truly reprehensible stuff is difficult to digest, and I do think that there were many signs that she knew she had neither the power or the means to actually make the changes she says she was seeking. She also makes excuses that she wasn't paid as much in her initial days because she didn't know about stock compensation and she just took the first offer they gave, but that rings a bit hollow to me, because that difference would've been amended within a few years, once she got promoted and figured out the general compensation range at Meta. Also it's not like she didn't have career options outside of Meta.
While the hypocrisy grinds me, I still feel that getting these stories out is important; morally upstanding people who quit early will not likely see and experience the full extent of the bad stuff companies do, and people who participate but stay quiet will not bring the bad stuff out in the open.
Maybe it truly was a naive belief that she could change the company's nature from the inside. Imagine I'm a developer with a passion for user privacy--I could see how, with enough alcohol in me, I might be able to almost make myself believe that if I joined Facebook, I could act as a force for good, and change how seriously the company took user privacy!
I think if I got that drunk I would end up at Apple.