[beachy]

Just to cherry-pick from your reply here, if $2M is the biggest ticket item you have to show for independent research on this topic - then you're woefully short given Facebook's revenues and size.

10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.

[nradov]

10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't think Facebook is the problem here.

How much exactly do you think Facebook ought to donate to independent researchers? Most tech companies donate ~0$ to such efforts.

[creato]

> 10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't think Facebook is the problem here.

That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.

[disgruntledphd2]

So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other.

The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least).

Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it.

The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.

As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection?

If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB?

If not, what makes FB different?

These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.

[TomSwirly]

I'm probably older than the average YCer.

I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write.

However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time.

I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day.

Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas.

Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc.

Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps?

Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes.

> The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.

1. Infectious diseases don't work that way!

2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong.

---

Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.

[close04]

> what makes FB different?

If it's not immediately apparent, pretty much no other medium in history (new or old) had/has the real reach Facebook has now. So taking it out of context and simply defining Facebook as a "new medium" is disingenuous. A firecracker and a bomb only differ in scale, hence the massive difference in how they're seen and treated.

With great power comes great legal and moral responsibility, and greater scrutiny. You can't shrug it off just because others have also done badly at this, especially when nobody else did it badly at such a massive scale.

[RNCTX]

Indeed.

I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat.

The pearl-clutching about social media is because power has been taken away. Media executives can no longer fancy themselves in control of people's minds, because they no longer have a monopoly on eyeballs via print and TV information.

Worse yet (for them), the user customizable nature of social media feeds mean that they can't even know what people really see.

If people use the internet to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not the internet.

[mnsc]

But back in Little Rock, AR when you were a kid. Are you sure that there was someone who sat in on every private gettogether in every house, located in a corner listening for keywords and when someone said something mildly racist this cornerman gently told your uncle that "these racist inclination you seem to have, did you know that the local bookstore White Pages™ has a book called Mein Kampf that confirms your suspicions, you should read that one, if you like of course, not telling you, just a friendly suggestion, it's actually on sale now".

[close04]

Does this mean you consider scale to be irrelevant to this situation? Because that's pretty much what the difference boils down to. You mention "media" as s singular entity but in reality the media of the past was a mosaic of thousands of individual outlets, newspapers, radios, TV stations. Today FB is a singular entity with the combined power of most of those together. Do you agree that changes the game?

FB has almost every eyeball now. Can you say the same about your fake Necronomicon? Book of spells? The media that controlled your mind?

The last statement is basically one against any form of control or regulation. If people use the x to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not x. Sometimes people need help.

[disgruntledphd2]

But it's not. The news on Facebook is in fact those newspapers, TV shows and whatnot, plus loads more amateurs than ever before.

They are a platform rather than a publisher, in my view at least.

[monadic2]

Honestly far more violent and highly accepted behaviors are pushed through media outlets as sane opinions every day, like military intervention or straight up misinformation campaigns (see: the OAS, who for some reason never evaluates the election health of rich northern american countries, who should logically have released some statement about facebook right now, let alone all the primary voting discrepancies). Hell the NyTimes alone had enough fuckups in the 00s alone they should be on the shortlist for fact checking suspicion.

If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion).

Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications.

IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.

[2019-nCoV]

Yes, the misleading dietary advice was objectively worse. How many needless deaths lost to the likes of diabetes and heart disease. The ramifications of the replication crisis (of which social media censorship also runs afoul) run much deeper.

[creato]

I think you are knowingly missing the point. Nutritional experts disagreed among themselves, and probably still do. Is there even a single 5G engineer that will take up the cause of 5G causing coronavirus? How about an immunologist that will claim Bill Gates is trying to inject people with microchips delivered in vaccines?

[2019-nCoV]

Which is why it's a non-sequitur. Any well-adjusted adult with a modicum of common sense can see through such claims. Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after. Removing such content just validates it in their minds — it must be true that's why "the corporations" insist on covering it up!

Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears.

Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.

[square_usual]

> Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after

The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article:

> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.

[tripzilch]

> Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after.

Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen.

It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.

[TomSwirly]

Hundreds of thousands of people are still in jail for drugs in the United States! Neither presidential candidate is for legalization of cannabis alone, and there is no talk of legalizing anything else.

I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world.

As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.

[rndgermandude]

Would literal witchhunts be a better example? Or hunting "communists"? Or Young Earth creationsim? The "idea" that your skintone and level of intelligence are "biologically" linked? Or Jet fuel cannot melt steal beams and 9/11 was an inside job? And don't even get me started about that fake moon landing... Oh no... I can hear an airplane, here come the chemtrails.

[beachy]

If I was a higher up at FB, I'd consider the risks to me as a business of these issues of polarization, and I'd spend according on advice and evaluation (a lot).

For example, if FB comes to be seen as a kind of mind control platform, that could be devastating as national govts decide to step in and put a stop to things. Imagine even a mid-sized country regulating that FB was responsible for tagging any posts that contained not just Covid-19 misinformation but all sorts of misinformation. That sort of thing could be extremely dangerous to FB's business model.

These sorts of risk in my mind would be very high indeed and I would devote a lot of resources to at the very least understand them. $2M is a drop in the bucket for a company with revenues of $70B for addressing such risk.

(Actually I checked and a bucket contains approx 10K drops, so this is actually surprisingly close to being a drop in the bucket).

[disgruntledphd2]

This already exists, in Singapore. See for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50613341

[square_usual]

> I don't think Facebook is the problem here.

Facebook's researchers seemed to think otherwise:

> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for [extremist groups'] growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

[adrianN]

Everything social that exists today already existed when humans were still living in trees. That doesn't mean that social media like Facebook can't serve as an amplifier that turns problems from annoyances to existential threats to our society.

[Frost1x]

>Most tech companies donate ~0$ to such efforts.

If they actually pay their taxes, they all do.

[shitgoose]

If they actually pay their taxes, they all do.

They don't.

[alpacaillama]

This is classic whataboutism. What does people being led to believe that fat was healthy have to do with Facebook’s deliberate inability to make their content less divisive

[nradov]

You missed the point. Too many people are credulous, and lack a rigorous education in epistemology and the scientific method. This has been a problem forever and isn't something Facebook can fix.

[alpacaillama]

I don’t expect them to come out with a perfect solution but if they can’t fix it and no one else can, but they still contribute to it I don’t see how why they should be above criticism and reproach?

Also the article mentions that even though they had they option to reduce it, they actively chose not to. How is this not something that I shod be critical of?

Why is growth above everything else important? What if they disabled the group discovery part? How is that impossible?

[john_minsk]

If no one else can fix it - we should criticise with a remark that BTW this is not fixable at the moment

Otherwise: Earth's gravity is too strong. Planes use too much fuel. Let's criticise Earth...

[Nevermark]

We are talking about existential threats to humanity. It might be hard to believe but humans ability to bring about bad outcomes is growing at a very fast pace.

Key players like Facebook throwing in the towel because “we don’t see an easy way to stop contributing to problems that are growing in size and can potentially destabilize democracies, world ecosystems, or a few decades from now hunan existence” is not an option.

The problems we have today are growing exponentially in seriousness. Human beings need to learn to get along in ways they never needed to before both due to resource stress and technological powers we never had before.

Facebook’s amplification of many human weaknesses is only one of many risk factors. But I don’t think many young people realize how easily humans have fallen into disasters in the past, which amplified by progress could easily become existential today.

[nradov]

As a Facebook user I like the group discovery feature. It works fine. There's no need to disable it.

[ceejayoz]

There's a big gulf between "this can't be completely fixed" and "let's squash efforts to mitigate it".

[rezonant]

It's definitely something Facebook can (and does) exacerbate though

[waheoo]

The while thing is, what does what other tech companies donate to have to do with anything?

Btw, some tech companies donate a fuckload to open source and other aligned initiatives. Its annoying to see this ignored for the sake of a weak argument.

[thu2111]

You inverted the statement in the act of repeating it back - people were misled into believing eating fat was unhealthy, not that it was healthy.

And this is a part of the problem, right? It's not whataboutism, it's a lesson from history. Your belief in the incorrect expert advice of yesteryear is so strong that even trying to type out the opposite is hard.

At the moment a whole lot of people, of the type who read and post to HN, have decided that disagreeing with "experts" is divisive. The problem is these "experts" aren't really experts by normal definitions, like someone who has a strong track record of correctly understanding and predicting a complex topic. The word is instead being used to mean something more like, "people employed by the government who claim special knowledge". Nutrition is the example chosen here for non-expert experts, because nutrition has been hit hard by the replication crisis. But it's hardly the only field with this problem - basically every medical authority has discredited itself during COVID.

Disagreement with authority is a classic justification for free speech. It is inherently perceived by the ruling classes as "divisive" because that's exactly what it does - it divides people into those disputing their authority and those who don't. You thus can't combat "divisiveness" without simply shutting down all disagreement with the government in all ways.

[guy_ro]

A counter-point to this is that studies show polarization has also fallen in some countries over the past years - including ones where social media (Facebook or otherwise) is popular. Studies also show some of the most polarized segments in the US to be the older population, which uses social media less. We definitely have work to do, but this suggests there are many factors at play.

[mola]

You have an interest in the outcome of the research, why should we trust you to conduct or fund it properly? Your track record is terrible. The fact you are throwing around dubious research as facts is crazy.

I'm sorry, but really, there's no reason to believe a word a you say.

You get paid from Facebook, Facebook lied again and again, how on earth do you expect people to take you seriously?

Your job and title is to give FB the optics of caring about integrity, and was invented as part of FB PR in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre.

The amount of cynicism is just mind boggling.

[rat9988]

>why should we trust you to conduct or fund it properly?

You are welcome to conduct research or fund it. You can even help current research by criticizing their research in its substance, or engage yourself politically (at least by voting) so we can have more and better research about the topic.

[mola]

I do, but that's irrelevant to the fact the corporate funded research is used to muddy the waters and make reality even less accessible than it is.

It's not the lack of research that's a problem, it's the weaponization of research.

[thu2111]

Outside of actual weapons research, research can't be "weaponised" and academia is rife with incredibly strong political biases. Political bias in academia is so severe that there is actually an entire foundation devoted to trying to combat it (the Heterodox Academy).

Your posts sound like you believe corporations shouldn't ever do research and worse, that academics don't have any interest in the outcomes of their own work. But that's nonsense, of course they do. They want to publish papers, they want their research findings to be novel and widely cited, they want to build a reputation. They have all kinds of self-interested incentives that act against producing accurate research findings; hence the replication crisis!

[dkersten]

So, what’s the solution?

How do you think Facebook should deal with this? If Facebook-funded research is suspect and nobody else is able or willing to fund it (why should someone else fund soemthing for Facebooks potential benefit, when Facebook are rich, and if someone else is funding research for Facebooks detriment, then I would say its equally suspect), how should such research be funded then?

How can you show results of the research in a way that you wouldn’t consider as “weaponized”?

I’m not a fan of Facebook and am quite suspicious of them, but I’m also not sure what they can do in this particular situation that we would find satisfactory,

[beachy]

That is interesting. My take would be that the older population may spend less time on social media (who can compete with a 20 year old with a phone welded to their hand anyway), but that a disproportionate number of these seniors are babes in the wood where technology is concerned, and are more amazed by, believing of, and susceptible to the influence of social media than youngsters who have grown up along with those social media platforms.

Would be very interesting to learn about these countries where polarization has fallen if you have links to hand.

[takeda]

Except now the people that use Facebook the most are grandparents (i.e. the demographic you mentioned that is most polarized). Facebook is no longer cool as it was 15 years ago.

[guy_ro]

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669

[disgruntledphd2]

A freely available version of this paper can be found here: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/cross-polar.pdf

[empressplay]

My experience on Facebook suggests almost the opposite - my younger friends tend to hold partisan opinions much more steadfastly than the older ones.

[charlesarthur]

The NBER paper that you point to in a subsequent comment doesn't have any detail on the popularity of social media; we explicitly can't make any determination on whether social media is having an effect there because the data is missing. If, say, Facebook were to provide external researchers with data about the growth in Facebook use - users, median time spent on site, average time spent, SD of time spent - for a number of years, that would help to identify whether social media has a role in such polarisation.

Although it's trivial to say "I see a lot of polarisation on social media, therefore it's worse than it was", a satellite-view paper like that NBER one gives zero insight into the role of social media, partly because the data isn't provided, but also because it doesn't examine what effects there might be on smaller groups within the population who are, say, heavy social media users.

I think the most useful thing Facebook could do would be to make more information available to researchers, rather than pointing to research which hasn't been able to use data and claim that helps exonerate Facebook.

[ghouse]

Which studies show this?

[ren01r]

Please share the studies which show the decline in polarisation, really interested in reading them.

[tripzilch]

I'm really curious which countries these are. Please do provide a reference to these studies.

[BubRoss]

Are you really trying to take credit for a flimsy correlation between facebook usage and polarization (in some countries, though you didn't say which ones or how many compared to other heavy use countries)

[meowface]

I think it's the reverse. They're trying to distance themselves from the notion that Facebook is the primary factor in what's polarizing (certain) people.

[hanspeter]

> Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook

You state this as a matter of fact. How do you know this?

Even if it were to be true, that people were more polarized in the climate worldview by Facebook and more so to the wrong side than the right side, we all know that climate change is the result of our behaviour the last centuries and that counter efforts has been resisted the last 50 years.

[beachy]

No arguments there, and my point was certainly overreach.

[asiachick]

Something like 85% of the planet believes in non-science. There are 2.3 billion Christians, 1.9 billion Islam, 1.1 billion Hindu and probably a billion "other" religion. The fact that people believe non-science has got nothing to do with Facebook.