The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.
Facebook is doing that in India as well. They are becoming Government Lap dog and do as its comfortable to their profits. Government of India able to suppress many dissent in recent years because of social media suppression. BTW Current government control News Channels by other means, we have term for Indian news channel as Godi Media. "Godi" in hindi literally means lap.
Transmission and protection are not neutral. They're a choice. Facebook has freedom of association and is allowed not to host content they believe harmful. Something they already do extensively. [1]
They are a choice, yes, the same way anything is. They are neutral choices in the same way roads and other infrastructure "permitting" criminals to use them are. The fact that Meta does not choose to be neutral in all such cases is not an argument against that.
It is definitely a valid argument. "Facebook should allow all content" is a consistent position if ultimately a stupid one. But once they decide to intervene all of the downstream choices are valid to question.
They were always valid to question regardless but that doesn't mean intervention is inherently good (nor bad).
We actively work to prevent anyone with a suspended license from using the road, so does it follow that failing to do the same for convicted rapists is a bad thing?
I don't think "Facebook should allow all content that is within the bounds of the law of the local jurisdiction" is stupid at all. Ideally that's how infrastructure-esque operations should conduct themselves.
That revised standard isn't obviously stupid, just vacuous, in two ways.
One, Facebook is nothing like neutral content infrastructure.
Two, laws come from somewhere. They are rooted in morality, and are always a snapshot of the historic violations bad enough to drive laws. Anybody who bases their behavior purely on the law has no morals, just fear of consequences. And when it's something new in the world, that stance guarantees ongoing harm until the law catches up.
Yes, but that is perfectly ok because we live in a society with not only freedom of speech but also freedom of the press, so it necessarily follows that it is ok to distribute speech that you don't like to a willing audience and also to profit from it. If that isn't ok, then neither is HN or the New York Times.
"Legal" and "perfectly okay" (aka socially acceptable or virtuous in some other way) are different things. If HN started paying people to post socially divisive content that wouldn't be okay at all (though it would almost certainly be legal).
“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
Meta has already been okay with drug use by allowing people to place ads and other posts clearly promoting drug use/sales. IIRC, 404 Media did an article on this
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
The constitution guarantees free speech, but not free drug use (though maybe it should). So I don't see any contradiction here. Meta has every right to police speech as it is a private company, but it has no obligation to do so.
It has no legal obligation. Participants in a society have a moral obligation not to harm that society. People not heeding that is how we ended up with most of our laws, so Facebook could well end up with legal obligations here if they keep this up.
I don't think the issue here is whether FaceBook is acting illegally, but whether it is acting responsibly, or just enshittifying society for it's own benefit.
Note incidentally that "free speech" doesn't mean you can say what you like. Yes, you can go out in public and swear and engage in hate speech - all legal - but for example you can't incite others to commit crimes, cross over into disorderly conduct, shout "fire" in a theater, etc.
The default feed is orders of magnitude more visible than the cherry-picked low-follower-count users that formed the basis of this article.
There’s a tremendous double standard here. The offensive right wing content is something you’d have to explicitly search for, whereas the offensive left wing content is front and center.
It's disingenuous to try to present all offensive subject matter as "differences of opinion" and objections as politically motivated.
Some subject matter, such as terrorist beheadings, animal abuse, sucker-punching strangers, etc, is just plain illegal and should not be publicized and glorified.
YOU may not agree, but society and the legal system has.
Out of curiosity, which part of the world are you in?
While agreeing that every side and compass orientation has conspiracy theories and ragebait, here in North America the right / Conservatives are foaming-at-the-mouth livid at the (real, Perceived, or mixed) wokeness / communism / liberallness of "mainstream media".
In this neck of the woods, the sentence "right has learned to tolerate different opinions they find offensive" isn't even hilariously wrong, it's tragically, despairngly, painfully bizarre :-(.
Ah, so you agree that a "white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links" is accepted as a right-wing voice these days? That's how it has looked to me since Charlottesville, but it's always nice to get it confirmed by people with different perspectives.
He really doesn't. Look at the consequences to him for wasting tens of billions on his "metaverse" fantasy, for example. Let me know if you find anything.
But even if he did, that doesn't require that he ignore negative externalities. Facebook has a Net Promoter Score similar to what health insurance companies and monopoly utilities do. Zuckerberg himself is disliked by 2/3rds of humanity. That's not good for long-term shareholder value.
Something else that's bad for long-term stock values? Profiting from slowly destroying the health of the societies in which all your customers live.
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
“Shareholder value” is ambiguous for good reason. It defers to the Board’s judgement. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t excuse this sort of incentivizing of crime.
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
Is that true?
And if it is true, he controls 60% of the voting power because he owns class B shares that get 10 votes each. Do you think he will sue himself if he fails to wring every last dollar out of Meta?
No, the OP is repeating a common misconception. Corporate law sets out a number of fiduciary duties, including to act in the best interest of the shareholders but “maximising shareholder value” is not one of them.
The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.
I think it's just something that Jack Welch at GE said so many times while making so much money that people started to believe it / wanted it to be true. I'd be happy to hear other stories about why this nonsense arose.
That's a serious oversimplification. A CEO doesn't have any duty to maximize profit at all costs. "Shareholder value" includes quite a lot of things that aren't directly about that at all. Often, the way to optimize shareholder value is to pass on certain practices that may be technically profitable.
Fiduciary duty only means acting in the interest of those providing you with money. If they demand sanity that can become the guiding goal instead of money. Never going to happen in the money first, I want more society we live in but there is no reason it can't. See some activist shareholders demanding change to boards to ensure certain outcomes not related to money.
I quote myself 2 years ago, forgive me if I’m stating the obvious:
I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
and a moral responsibility to do otherwise. Or, well---whether or not you agree that it is the case in some cosmic sense, it is still how we get to judge him.
Ironically he seems to be very sensitive to this judgment. You would think he would also take action on the basis of it, but so far, seemingly not?
Right? If the press and commentariat is to be believed, these companies are run by genius titans who can do anything, anything at all. Except something good for the societies they and their shareholders live in and profit from. That would be a violation of the gospel of St Ayn, and therefore unthinkable.
“An ABC NEWS Verify investigation into several controversial Australian pages on Facebook has found that some are benefiting directly from social media monetisation programs run by Meta.”
They are paying him for his content. Funding him, if you will.
Virtually every company pays people to do stuff and then profits off of the stuff those people do.
There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual. Nobody is committing genocide because they saw a violent movie whereas Facebook shares responsibility for at least one recognized genocide and a number of smaller scale events where the company amplified hateful content and was very slow to take it down. A key distinction here is choice: I don’t accidentally start watching a slasher movie or listening to gangster rap, but Facebook / TikTok / X will ensure that I see unrequested content if it’s something their algorithms reward for “engagement” (i.e. it sells ads), it won’t be labeled, and they won’t let you reliably control it because they’d lose money if Facebook had a “only show my actual friends’ posts” default.
> There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual.
The difference is far more nuanced and borders on inconsequential when it comes to mass media influence on society.
Just because something is presented as fiction or for entertainment doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact your psyche or your perception of the world and others.
It’s complicated, yes, but my point is essentially just that someone saying “<ethnicity> are stealing our country! Force them out!” is specifically calling for violence directed against that group in a way that, say, a movie full of mayhem probably isn’t. That’s because, say, Paramount has editorial control and will never greenlight anything close to what many Facebook / X accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers say every day.
You certainly accidentally start listening to gangster rap when it's played on TV, on the radio, or on the auto playlists from streaming services. Or you wouldn't turn on your radio by accident, but then you wouldn't open Facebook by accident either.
Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore. So if we treat it as harmless entertainment, then we should apply the same standard to content published on social media. Publishing genocidal content would be beyond that, nobody would disagree. Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?
As for violent movies or torture horror movies which are so celebrated in mainstream culture, their impact on viewers minds and souls are probably worse than a lot of what people here don't like on Facebook.
> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide
What's your evidence for this? You seem to be making the claim that without gangster rap there's a bunch of violent crime that wouldn't have happened. But it seems more plausible to me that the bulk of that crime is due to the drug trade and other social and economic factors, and that gangster rap is just the musical expression of what's already going on.
And I'd expect the same to be true of, say, country music. Are you also going to claim that people who listened to a lot of Johnny Cash were more inclined to shoot people, possibly in Reno, just to watch them die? Did many Merle Haggard fans turn to crime because of him?
Personally, I listened to plenty of Ice T, NWA, and Snoop. Sometimes I still do. I have yet to become a stick-up kid or pack a 9 mil. Should I be worried? If there's some sort of threshold dosage, I might go over it at any time.
> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore
Citation needed here. I haven’t known anyone to do that despite it being pretty mainstream and U.S. crime rates have been going down for ages so there doesn’t appear to be a general correlation (repeat for the video games which have been so railed against).
I think most people understand the difference between entertainment and reality in that context. What makes social media different is that it’s portrayed as real: people get constant reinforcement that “people like me” think horrible things about Muslims, LGBTQ, liberals, etc. and use that to justify “strike first” messaging. We’ve seen that same playbook in the past (Bosnia, Rwanda, etc.) but those required more money and state control of media whereas social media is far more accessible to even a small minority of extremists looking to spread their messages.
> Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?
I note that you conspicuously omit the white-coded heavy metal used by other war criminals, but more importantly you’d need to again submit show some data supporting causation rather than simple popularity and answer the big question about whether it’s the case that the music has that effect or simply that people trying to indoctrinate use music which is already popular because it’s familiar and had the mood they wanted. For example, I don’t think anyone would say Metallica inspires torture despite it being used in the American torture program in Guantanamo — almost all of the millions of people who listen to their albums have never engaged in serious violence and the people who committed war crimes would’ve picked something else if they were in a different cultural context.
If you truly deny the effect that gangster rap has, then I can't take your comment as honest. Then we might just as well say that ISIS propaganda also has no effect on their targeted audience, and their stuff is just for entertainment. Because what "citations" do you have that people can be influenced by ISIS propaganda.
When a drill rapper makes a song threatening to murder specific people, and also posts these threats on social media, and finally commits to it and murders somebody. Is that not reality? Because it happens all the time. But maybe the social media post is the only problem in this situation?
If political terrorists are listening to music all day about bombing cafés, kidnapping people, smuggling drugs and assassinating their enemies and they actually do so at thousands per year - would you say this music is just entertainment for people living in that world. Because that is exactly the situation with gangster rap, and has been for a long time. And you might listen to it just for entertainment so it's nothing to be concerned about. To you it's entertainment because you're comfortably distant from the effects. How do you think somebody who's had their sibling murdered by a gang feels hearing that gangs music being blasted where they rap about murdering and mutilating people?
> the white-coded heavy metal used by other war criminals
Whatever this is, it is not played on the radio all day and Sony and Warner aren't making millions from it and they're not performing at the half time show. Maybe their songs are catchy and they should be played in cafés and in your Uber. I've heard that some ISIS songs are supposed to be quite catchy.
> If you truly deny the effect that gangster rap has, then I can't take your comment as honest
I’m not denying anything, I’m asking you to support your claim. In particular, if an entire genre loved by millions of people causes this problem, why do we not see it very commonly or with such variability across countries? How can we say the problem is the music rather than other things going on in those people’s lives which are more unique to their experience than a musical genre?
> why do we not see it very commonly or with such variability across countries?
If you don't see it, it is because you have closed your eyes. It is across countries and reported in main stream media all the time. Rap music is a core part of ongoing gang conflicts in many countries, apart from the general violence and sexual crime it inspires and glorifies.
> How can we say the problem is the music rather than other things going on in those people’s lives which are more unique to their experience than a musical genre?
Then how can we say that the problem is anything that somebody has posted on social media or broadcasted? If I make rap music about dealing drugs and killing people and I also deal drugs and kill people, and many of my listeners deal drugs and kill people. What is the difference if I make a social media post about killing people and then me and my audience kill people? The difference is that one behaviour is celebrated - and romanticized extensively by certain types of persons who feel no empathy at all for the victims.
I never said that rap music is the only thing causing people to commit crime.
> If you don't see it, it is because you have closed your eyes. It is across countries and reported in main stream media all the time. Rap music is a core part of ongoing gang conflicts in many countries, apart from the general violence and sexual crime it inspires and glorifies.
It’s weird how this is simultaneously a “core part of ongoing gang conflicts” and something you can’t support in the slightest.
If you want to, you can in seconds use a search engine to find as many obituaries and newspaper reports of rappers killing people or being killed by people as you please, and their gang affiliations and so forth. Or you could just go and talk to people in those circles and get it straight from the horses mouth.
But I suppose that you first will go and find "citations" and evidence that social media content can have any effect at all on people. Because that is just as unproven, if you want to play that kind of game.
But I'm interested in real conversation with real people, who aren't pretending to not see, think or hear.
This type of comment is why K-12 education in the US really needs to start focusing on skills related to disinformation. The example given here is obviously an art vs disinformation/misinformation/psyops. They aren't the same and conflating them doesn't do anyone any good.
Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs. You'd think that money being paid would also mean a higher level of scrutiny. I'm really curious how these conversations play out internal to Meta. Does everyone just pretend this isn't an issue? Seems like there's a lot of great book material that will be dropped in the coming decades as these efforts wear on and break people.
Are you implying gangster rap wasnt cultivated and pushed to the masses by the large media companies? The only difference between then and now is the technology available and the name of the companies.
In real life right now and for many years, we have gangster rappers (or drill or trap, whatever you'd like to call it) who are funded by record companies, broadcasted everywhere, and praised by the mainstream. Including being broadcasted and celebrated by public service stations.
In their records they rap about murdering people and raping women, and also threatening to murder specific individuals or bragging about having done such. Among other things.
They are also active on social media, where they also threaten people with violence and death, or brag about such feats.
And finally they also murder people in real life, or get murdered likewise by their peers.
Now for the same person, expressing themselves the same way but on different platforms. For their record company funded content we say "that's art and free speech", and for their social media posts we say "what have you done, Zuckerberg!?".
> Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs.
You are right. I misunderstood the program to be general payments to all creators of size á la Spotify, but it's an invite-only program.
> In their records they rap about murdering people and raping women, and also threatening to murder specific individuals or bragging about having done such. Among other things.
Ahhh, yes this trope. You do understand their target market, right? There are people that grow up in unfortunate circumstances that live through those lyrics regardless of these music-led influencers you speak of. People relate to those lyrics, it's part of their world view and so, yes, they're being marketed to, quite simply.
Also, why stop here? Let's ban all books that encroach on this topic! Because we all know games, books and music yield nothing but the 80% of all the lyrics you consume. /s (<--- because who knows given the absurdity here)
Gangster rap strengthens it, just like social media posts strengthen movements and actions that might or might not have happened regardless.
> There are people that grow up in unfortunate circumstances that live through those lyrics regardless of these music-led influencers you speak of.
Yes, do you think they enjoy hearing rap music from the gang that murdered or raped one of their family members being blasted, where the rappers brag about murdering and raping people? Then a bunch of people who are comfortably isolated from that kind of violence praise these rappers to the skies, give them industry awards, and so on.
> Also, why stop here? Let's ban all books that encroach on this topic!
Some countries ban music which glorifies violence, but I haven't called out for the ban of anything. I'm making comparisons.
How come people and governments and courts are blasting Instagram for giving young girls eating disorders because models are uploading bikini photos, but at the same time everybody turns a blind eye to music where the artist raps and brags about drugging, raping, beating and murdering women? Or men. When these artists are often guilty of these crimes or strongly affiliated with gangs doing these things.
> Even if its an engineer that's making 6 figures that you are liekly alluding to, do you expect everyone to agree with your moral code and quit their job?
No, but you shouldn't expect to see them addressed with respect either, just like Enron traders, Purdue salesmen or tobacco scientists don't get a lot of it.
And second best would be these people owning their moral vacuity.
I can sort of respect a response like, "Yeah, I like Zuckerberg's money and I don't give a shit about the harm I'm enabling. I'll keep cashing my checks and being an asshole." It's the people who expect us to pretend they're not asshole that get to me. They want the upside of bad behavior without the downside. Sorry bub, FAFO.
Everyone has the moral obligation to not enable or profit from harm. Do we all live up perfectly to that all the time? No. There's no meaningful moral rule where people can do that. If there were, it wouldn't be worth having as a moral rule.
Is Zuckerberg responsible for the harm he's causing? Yes. Are the workers enabling that responsible? Yes. Are the people who profit from indirectly supporting that responsible? Yes. Responsibility is not zero sum.
"Harm" is a mushy term that means everything and nothing. There are many competing definitions of "harm" based on one's cultural, religious, and philosophical priors. So what kind of harm are you talking about exactly?
That any particular thing is harmful can be a worthwhile discussion, one that has been going on for centuries and will continue for centuries more. The notion that nothing is harmful is idiotic, so I presume you're not claiming that. As long as we agree that harm to others exists, my point stands. If you'd like the details, I suggest you consult said centuries of dialog. But in practice, it's pretty clear that people can and do come to useful decisions on the nature of harm all the time.
If you work for a company, you are enabling that company's practices. If those practices are bad and you are aware of them, then continuing to work there means your hands are dirty too.
People have, of course, every right to make such a decision based on their own ethical sensibilities. I have every right to judge them based on mine.
These big companies have orgs within them that do, e.g., charitable work. Or work on standards or open source. Or accessibility or inclusion or other work to genuinely improve lives. How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?
I would understand if you said, "Nope, still equally responsible" or if you said, "Relatively less worried about these folks".
Genuinely interested in hearing thoughts about these orgs at big companies.
Doing good deeds does not absolve anyone of their bad deeds.
> How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?
If it's getting the company to fund your altruistic efforts and isn't benefiting that company, then it's not contributing to the bad deeds. Otherwise, it is.
Either way, if you're working for the company, then you're still enabling them. Whether or not you participate in internal do-gooding efforts doesn't change that.
> Anecdotally, it’s getting harder for them to date
I wonder how much of this is the reputation, and how much is the same thing over all society in recent years.
(Alternative narrative: everyone else is fine and the news stories about this are all driven by people at Meta having above-average influence on the news reporting and/or who is going to participate in the surveys).
“Anecdotally” this is not the case, it’s getting harder for everyone to date meta employees are not doing worse than anyone else and with their income likely the opposite
> it’s getting harder for everyone to date meta employees are not doing worse
Anecdotally, I know several women and a few men in New York and the Bay Area who have drawn a line on dating anyone at Meta. They want to raise families and don’t feel comfortable with someone with those values. None of them are woke or leftist. One of them worked there. All of them make good money.
If I were dating today, I don’t think I’d date someone who chooses to continue working there. (Unless they were doing research.) And I don’t have a lot of those limits.
> There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
Terrible take. Trying to moral gymnastics your way out of taking responsibility for who you work for. If you're working at meta it's unlikely to be your only good option. Yes, the janitors get a pass.
Have you ever read it? It was published in _1970_ and the content isn't really about stealing books, but about fighting against the government and corporations. Its more political commentary than anything else.
Yes, bookstores should stock it, and libraries should shelve it. Its something everybody should read at least once, for some perspective at least.
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.