[arczyx]

I really don't want to ask this since it run contrary to HN rules, but did you really read the article?

No one expect Facebook to remove all misinformation/hate speech/etc. That is unreasonable. But they have literally 1 data scientist to monitor the whole non-western world.

In a year where their annual profit is $23.9bn.

Assuming 1 data scientist is paid $500k/year, surely it is sensible to dedicate $20mn, less than 0.1% of their annual profit, to hire 40 more such data scientist and literally increase their effectiveness on this topic by 4000%? At the very least, this is what I expect from a company that actually have a speck of moral.

> A strategic response manager told me that the world outside the US/Europe was basically like the wild west with me as the part-time dictator in my spare time. He considered that to be a positive development because to his knowledge it wasn’t covered by anyone before he learned of the work I was doing.

[fsociety]

When you write “they have literally 1 data scientist to monitor the whole non-western world”, I assume you mean Sophie Zhang. I agree with a lot of what she said, and I mean a lot, but you have a misconception.

The integrity org, back when I was there, had thousands of folks and was aggressively hiring. They were not a lone island and were also supported by other orgs like data infra, FAIR, security, privacy, product teams and more.

Site integrity, Sophie’s team, was a small piece of the work done there. And they, like any team, relied heavily on other teams. You have all this unbelievable tooling internally, and internal teams are incentivized to get you to use it.

These issues were not from want of trying. The reality is that problems like this at scale are incredibly difficult. In my opinion, Frances trivialized a lot of this in her whistleblowing, but it makes a good news story so what can you do.

It pains me when people trivialize it as “just do the machine learnings to fix it all” or “if these tech companies actually gave a damn this wouldn’t be an issue”. It’s an incredibly hard problem, and much like security it will never be “solved”.

That doesn’t excuse when technology has a bad effect on the world. We need to be better, and for the most part as a society we are trying hard as hell. It’s also why the work is interesting and impactful. More should get into it.

[bostik]

I'll provide a slightly different argument.

I talked to FB people (recruiters, managers) in the site integrity team back in 2018. Admittedly I had some reservations up front, but during the on-site day I made up my mind to never even consider FB as a potential employer again. During a chat session between interviews, I asked about the prospect of doing proactive education - essentially, detecting users who had been caught in the influence operations and then surfacing them a note that they had been targeted by such activities, so that they could themselves make educated decisions.

The senior manager I was talking with at the time was visibly taken aback by the very idea. "We don't do that!"

From that experience I drew the inference that FB are fundamentally, as an organisation, incapable of doing the right thing. I suspect it's less about the cost, and more about the prospect of openly accepting accountability for what their platform is really used for.

[anon84873628]

The series of articles makes it very clear that there are simple, non-high tech things Facebook could have done to mitigate the problem.

Insisting that it's hard and requires advanced ML is complete BS. Self delusion by FB'ers to give themselves and excuse for their complicity.