Remember: someone went out of their way and put effort into programming this.
An entire team.
A study published in a medical journal showed that Facebook (primarily) along with other social media was responsible for the rise in teenage suicide in girls. Let that sink in.
I 100% believe that Facebook and friends are contributing to this trend but it’s important to note that the linked study does not conclude that causation is present:
There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.
lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.
How did they come up with this idea? Did the algorithm suggest this pattern, or did someone in marketing come up with it?
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
Even though Luigi Mangione didn’t actually commit any crime and his trial is a flimsy sham, I agree. He is the public face of whoever really did it, and they are an icon of justice.
Praise the king!
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
If I could go back in time to the moment when ARPANET was created and show them what it would become, I would also beg them to stop their efforts.
“You will create the thing that will destroy us.”
I’m not sure if it’s possible to build a healthy social network.
Smaller communities can work, if they’re well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.
Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.
So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.
Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.
Facebook… now even more toxic than previously known!
Zuckerberg’s $300 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
My thoughts exactly.
Ah right, still in the north sea outside of Norway. Recently there was news of Sami villages being bribed to not put up a fuss when a “prominent person” wanted to go heliskiing, then his yacht arrived on site:
Translation of article from behind paywall: The Facebook CEO’s enormous yacht has been anchored in a Norwegian fjord near the Swedish border.
Now DN can reveal that several Sami villages have been offered compensation for not saying no to a “prominent person” going on a luxury helicopter skiing trip in the mountains.
- They wanted to buy our silence, says a representative of a Sami village.
At least three villages were contacted in March by a company that arranges helicopter skiing trips. The Sami villages have been offered compensation, ahead of a very secret group of tourists arriving to ski in the Swedish mountains in April. A Norwegian village team has also received a similar offer.
- We understood that it was something special. The organizers were very keen for us to say yes, even though this is before the calving season when the ewes are pregnant and all the reindeer are very fragile after a tough winter, says a representative of a Sami village.
Helicopter skiing in untouched lands, known as heliskiing, has been criticized by reindeer owners for destroying nature and disturbing the reindeer – and the issue has been raised by the Norrbotten County Administrative Board to the government.
According to sources from several Sami villages, the plans for this particular April visit were somewhat out of the ordinary.
The Sami villages, which use helicopters in their reindeer husbandry, were offered six hours of helicopter use by the organizer – which corresponds to around 50,000 kronor.
On April 1, one of the largest private luxury yachts in existence arrived in Bodö, Norway – something that caused a stir in the Norwegian media.
It is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Facebook company Meta, who is one of the richest people in the world. He is one of the billionaires who has tried to approach US President Donald Trump by, among other things, donating money.
Can’t go skiing with the plebs, no.
“Plebs” go skiing 👀
Well, i’m Swiss and here it’s something most people do once or twice per season. But yeah, plebs from Zucks view, anything than the richest or most powerful people.
Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
can’t believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
This is the sort of thing machine learning algorithms are pretty good at at.
Coupled with however many millions of interactions a day, you would have no problem correlating changes to your algorithm against increases in revenue.
But. It’s often not that impressive. Humans are equally good at noticing patterns.
All it takes is for one person at FB to see their wife or daughter delete a post, ask them “why did you delete that post” and take away from the response of “It made me look fat” to go “there’s a new targeted ad that’ll get me a bonus”.
In a similar vein, 80% of your banks anti-fraud systems isn’t deep learning models that detect fraudulent behaviour. Instead it’s “if the user is based in Russia, add 80 points, and if the account is at a branch in 10km of Heinersdorf Berlin, add another 50…. We’re pretty sure a Russian scammer goes on holiday every 6 months and opens a bunch of accounts there, we just don’t know which ones”.
I’d bet on it being algorithmic from Facebook because leaning into algorithms is part of that company’s culture. A bunch of manual tweaks require maintenance, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was thinking about this when deciding that deleted selfie should be a different signal to the algorithm than deleted picture of cat.
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you’re thinking: an asshole came up with it because it’s logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit’s trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
Can you make the algorithm open source that determined it was ok for you to murder Tuvix tho
if (ugly) { kill_child(child_name); } else { ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) }JANEWAY DID WHAT SHE HAD TO DO
People who traded morals for money.
The kind of person whose past probably includes more than a few vivisected animals.
Fucking hell. That is vile!
And tiktok is supposed to be our enemy?
TikTok absolutely does the same kind of thing and worse. Engagement is all that matters. Doesn’t matter what kind, what about, or how that engagement is generated.
I’m very skeptical that the Chinese government having your data as an American is worse than the American government and corporations (you know, the people with applicable jurisdiction) having it. Seems more likely to me that American interests just weren’t happy about a huge platform of Americans not being under their umbrella of control and censorship. Sure, you could argue that China of course has their own, but the two wouldn’t completely overlap, so there were windows where things could be freely and organically discussed and organized by Americans, without American government and corporate interference. Obviously that couldn’t be allowed to stand.
That’s very nice and cute that you’re skeptical, but they’re literally doing the same thing, except with a goal of weakening America instead generating more money.
Your skepticism doesn’t matter- it’s an attack on you, stop excusing it.
Yes there definitely would be an alterior agenda to the reasons for the push to hate on tiktok data fears. But that’s not to say that people are any safer (data wise) with US big tech.
Big tech is our enemy. It doesn’t matter if it’s facebook or tiktok.
I agree!
Both can be enemies.
both ARE enemies.
I agree. I’m addressing the obvious hypocrisy of big tech
Por que no los dos?
Another reason I’ll never use Facebook. It’s been a hellsite for a long time
Let’s not pretend that we don’t have this type of thing happen to us. Maybe not beauty products but any time I slip outside of my ad blockers I’m made accurately aware that they’re always listening. It’s not a coincidence the ads you see, the TikToks, and the Facebook ads. It’s just used for adds right now but it should scare the shit out of people.
Sometimes you can’t help but acknowledge the cleverness of evil.
