The antidote to that would be for Meta to reveal all their internal communications. But they'll never do that because their own words and actions are likely far more damning than any story the DOJ could weave.
The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.
A key part of trials like this is the discovery process, which would surface a lot of the documents and emails that supposedly contain this information you’re talking about.
If the lawyers found it, they’d be using it. I think the takeaway from this is that they decided their own catchphrase was more compelling than any language they found in those documents.
I know about discovery. I have a hard time believing that Meta is being perfectly transparent or comprehensive in what they disclose to the prosecution.
> The fun part is their internal communication might be relatively exculpatory, but a good prosecutor can find the crumb or two to hang them.
To the first part of that sentence: maybe, but I highly doubt it and these would be the last people on earth to give the benefit of the doubt to. Zuckerberg, and his peers, are operating in an "us vs them" mentality and we should also prosecute them in the exact same manner. They don't care about their users and they don't view them as humans or equals in any regard. They are parasites who only consume, cast blame, have zero interest in what's fair and treat everything around them as a capitalistic game of who can hoard the most. I would love to see Zuckerberg have to defend himself in a court of law and, instead of dodge every question, have to answer to his worldly peers in a truthful manner. The hatred towards a person like that must weigh on him. The best part about him is Facebook was an initiative in his own failings amongst his personal life. And it never filled that void. Zuckerberg is probably still socially broke on the inside. He's a terrible human through and through.
Indeed. Especially since we know that they know that they reserve the worst of it for face to face conversation and nothing gets recorded and it's all for the sake of maintaining plausible deniability. When asked about their private conversations they can and do lie.
If you are into the book, I would highly recommend commentary from people who were also at the firm at the same time and currently working on the field.
> I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?
I think if facebook code governs your life, the major part of the fault does not lie with facebook. It is possible to live not being chained to the feed 24x7.
So far it seems to be the least-worst option. I wish there was a way to enable a citizen to vote their choice but do so in at least a reasonably informed way.
The greatest strength of democracy is an ironclad guarantee that even people holding ideas opposed to current leaders', if there are enough likeminded people, can win power.
That's what lets democracies change, even radically, through elections rather than revolutions.
Unfortunately... the universal and equal suffrage that's a cornerstone of that also precludes any sorting by authority of vote value.
Otherwise you inevitably end up with authority putting its thumb on the scales, similar to Iranian democracy (by design).
I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.
Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.
So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched.
I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preempt a litany of more granular searches.
This might be an area where a traditional, respectful search engine style crawler backed by a small cheap LLM paired with human curation would work well. The crawler+LLM finds sites, attempts to compute some quality score, figures out where they'd fit in the directory's hierarchy, and then submits them for human review and approval. If a poor quality link makes its way through, users can flag it for review and if curation agrees it gets booted.
I'm leaning against the user flagging model of content moderation because it keeps the incentive for bad actors to try to game the system. Bad content, even briefly included can still do a lot of damage. It's like spam email -- even though something like 99.9% gets filtered out, that 0.1% is still valuable enough for spam senders to keep trying. If the problem of spam is just a numbers game, then bad actors will just increase the volume to compensate.
The problem is that it can also be gamed in the opposite direction. Anything automated gives a way for hostile third parties to disappear links at will, which can be similarly damaging especially if timed right. YouTube and many other sites with automated DMCA handling for example have major issues with this.
The scale of this would need to be unfathomable. Doesn’t YouTube get something like 100 years of video uploads every day? You’d need hundreds of thousands of people working full time to review that much footage manually.
Isn't that kind of the point though? We don't need 100 years of video uploads every day. We need fewer, higher quality videos. If 90% of those were likely to get rejected, such as all the low-effort AI spam videos generated today, then there wouldn't be much incentive to submit them in the first place. The volume of uploads would drop. This is only a problem if you're an advertising platform who needs an endless stream of new crap to recommend to your users to try to keep them on the platform as long as possible.
This is why I keep landing on moderation-before-inclusion as the standard. Review systems that flag bad content means that bad content still gets seen, and often still has enough of an effect to make it worthwhile for bad actors to churn out. IMO that's part of explanation of why there's 100 years of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. Even videos that get taken down get some exposure; increasing the volume of crap is a solution for their short life span. It seems like a self-reinforcing problem there, even if there were an honest attempt at moderation.
The old content doesn't go away, but YouTube is incredibly bad at making it effectively searchable. They don't want you to find the highest quality videos on a topic, they want you to plug in to the endless new stream of slop which just recapitulates things which were done better before.
This isn't really an "old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn" take that everything older is better. Instead I'm saying that the Wikipedia approach to help users find and collaborate on good content to make it even better or more comprehensive is preferable to the approach that the only way to be seen is to endlessly publish new content, which is meant to obscure what came before it on a topic. It's like if you walked into a library, but the only thing visible was a "new releases" shelf and searching the stacks was nearly impossible. That would make it basically a matter of luck if you found anything relevant, and makes deep research impossible.
It's almost like what we really need is someone to simply index the sites that have the actual primary sources so we can search them and find them quickly! /s
Does it work because you're taking advantage of a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to manipulation? People who already struggle with impulse control, who are prone to making bad financial decisions? The elderly, kids?
We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".
Some of us, just some think that maybe enterprises that prey on the vulnerable just don't deserve to be in business. Otherwise everything might as well be payday loans and online gambling. I'm not saying OP is definitely in that category, but I would encourage them to think long and hard about weather or not using dark patterns to goose their sales is really the kind of world we want to be fostering.
Well, if you own an online casino, I guess your moral compass is already so skewed that you simple don't care. On the other hand, if you own an online mom & pop store that sells clothes for puppies, you rationalize that the impact of those manipulations is not that big of a deal. You're not ruining anyone's live by the single act of persuading them to purchase $100 worth of apparel for mr. pancake.
I agree with you too, but I don't think it's necessarily a gross over-exaggeration: it's possible that the majority of the buying population are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
"Average" doesn't necessarily mean half way between two extremes - the average human might actually be all of:
- extremely vulnerable to manipulation
- struggling with impulse control
- prone to making bad financial decisions
- the elderly / kids (<16/>60)
Based on age demographics, rampant consumerism and social media addiction, especially in those age demographics, I'd be more inclined to guess the average human is all of those things.
> We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".
I agree. But.
I run an online business. It's tough. I scrape by. GP noted that the skeezy popup "Boosted conversion rate meaningfully". So that's real money in GP's pocket that they presumably use to have a nicer life. At what cost? Some popup? I mean…
Would I take more money in my pocket? Boy, I'd like that. So far I haven't gone the skeezy popup route, but the day I try, and more money ends up in my pocket, it's gonna be hard to turn that thing off.
Yeah, I mean at the end of the day there is clearly a spectrum of conversion rate optimizing stuff you can do, some of which is fine and some of which is unethical. A/B testing the color of your add to cart button and using the one that converts best? I think it'd be a little crazy to argue that's unethical manipulation. Lying to customers about the product to get them to buy? Obviously bad.
Silly obnoxious social proof popup is clearly on the ethical side in my view (my issue was never ethics, just that I personally find them very annoying). I'm not misleading anyone (it does in fact show real purchases) or forcing anyone to do anything. If that's the difference between you buying or not, I still feel perfectly comfortable that you made the choice of your own free will.
"This time it's different" is also a refrain we've heard with every new bubble. It shouldn't be surprising that some people want to take a measured, skeptical approach. Even if it means they are slightly behind the bleeding edge. Even if you have to play catch-up, it can be more efficient to let others find all the dead ends first and avoid them.
It's not the whole story. The biggest change is actually the internal rules for how downtime was reported, it wasn't actually such a large change in the actual reliability then.
> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?
Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!
It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.