[dgellow]

Yes, that's true. At the same time the argument of "The Social Dilemma" is that at Facebook scale you just need a very small effect to influence the crowd in a way that matters. Paraphrasing the documentary (from memory): tuning human behaviours 1% in the direction you want, worldwide, is what Facebook sells and what their customers pay for.

[edmundsauto]

Isn't that the goal of just about all human behavior, to influence other humans behavior? Is the issue with Facebook that they are too effective at it, or is it that most marketing & advertising behavior is unethical?

[dgellow]

I don’t understand this hyper relativism.

I personally don’t see my goal, the goal of projects I work on, the goal of companies I work for, or anything else I contribute to, to be about manipulating people behaviors without their knowledge and/or consent.

Facebook has been doing completely unethical experiments since forever (are you aware of their role in Rohingya’s genocide in Myanmar?). They have been open about a lot of them, bragging how good they are at manipulating crowds.

And yes, they are crazy effective. And they have the scale. They have unethical behaviors, that are effective, applied at humanity scale.

[edmundsauto]

My understanding of the Myanmar incident is that FB didn't swiftly block material used to inflame already existing ethnic tensions? From what I know, the fault there is they allowed communication in language that their AI and human reviewers couldn't understand.

Was there more to it than that?