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It’s Time to Shut Down Facebook February 23, 2018

Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture.
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You heard it here first, but I suspect that the cacophony will only grow once Facebook’s, well, gross incompetence, and its embracement of that incompetence, becomes more apparent to more people.  To some people, Facebook is a benign tool for staying in touch with people (like we can’t write letters or emails anymore?).  To many more, it is an instrument for spreading hate and discord.

And Facebook very much enables the latter.  I am simply disgusted over its role in promoting fake news and hate in response to the recent school shooting.  You should be too.  Its excuses are not only hollow and without meaning, but they also deny any responsibility for the havoc it has enabled.

I get the feeling that senior Facebook executives gather around Mark Zuckerberg’s desk almost daily, cackling merrily about the latest trick that got past their algorithms.  In fact, the latest is doctored photos (paywall), which can be done by any 12-year old with Photoshop.  Or even with Microsoft Paint.

They don’t want to solve the problem.  It’s too much trouble.  And they are the smartest people in the room, so if they can’t see a solution, there isn’t one.  And Zuckerberg continues to think it is a non-problem, and that there is an engineering solution to this non-problem.  In reality, if he wants to continue in the social media business, he needs to throw away every single line of code and start over again.

That won’t happen, of course.  So we need to shut down Facebook.  To be fair, it’s not clear how that would happen.  While it is possible to imagine criminal charges or regulatory violations, the legal system moves in slow and mysterious ways.  And Zuckerberg will likely just move the whole thing offshore anyway.

So the only feasible solution is for every single person to stop using Facebook, now.  How will you keep in touch with people, you ask in horror.  Well, I have some thoughts about that, too.  In the next post.

Are Engineering and Ethics Orthogonal Concepts? November 18, 2017

Posted by Peter Varhol in Algorithms, Technology and Culture.
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Let me explain through example.  Facebook has a “fake news” problem.  Users sign up for a free account, then post, well, just about anything.  If it violates Facebook’s rules, the platform generally relies on users to report, although Facebook also has teams of editors and is increasingly using machine learning techniques to try to (emphasis on try) be proactive about flagging content.

(Developing machine learning algorithms is a capital expense, after all, while employing people is an operational one.  But I digress.)

But something can be clearly false while not violating Facebook guidelines.  Facebook is in the very early stages of attempting to authenticate the veracity of news (it will take many years, if it can be done at all), but it almost certainly won’t remove that content.  It will be flagged as possibly false, but still available for those who want to consume it.

It used to be that we as a society confined our fake news to outlets such as The Globe or the National Inquirer, tabloid papers typically sold at check-out lines at supermarkets.  Content was mostly about entertainment personalities, and consumption was limited to those that bothered to purchase it.

Now, however, anyone can be a publisher*.  And can publish anything.  Even at reputable news sources, copy editors and fact checkers have gone the way of the dodo bird.

It gets worse.  Now entire companies exist to write and publish fake news and outrageous views online.  Thanks to Google’s ad placement strategy, the more successful ones may actually get paid by Google to do so.

By orthogonal, I don’t mean contradictory.  At the fundamental level, orthogonal means “at right angles to.”  Variables that are orthogonal are statistically independent, in that changes in one don’t at all affect the other.

So let’s translate that to my point here.  Facebook, Google, and the others don’t see this as a societal problem, which is difficult and messy.  Rather they see it entirely as an engineering problem, solvable with the appropriate application of high technology.

At best, it’s both.  At worst, it is entirely a societal problem, to be solved with an appropriate (and messy) application of understanding, negotiation, and compromise.  That’s not Silicon Valley’s strong suit.

So they try to address it with their strength, rather than acknowledging that their societal skills as they exist today are inadequate to the immense task.  I would be happy to wait, if Silicon Valley showed any inclination to acknowledge this and try to develop those skills, but all I hear is crickets chirping.

These are very smart people, certainly smarter than me.  One can hope that age and wisdom will help them recognize and overcome their blind spots.  One can hope, can’t one?

*(Disclaimer:  I mostly publish my opinions on my blog.  When I use a fact, I try to verify it.  However, as I don’t make any money from this blog, I may occasionally cite something I believe to be a fact, but is actually wrong.  I apologize.)

Facebook, Fake News and Accounts, and Where Do We Go From Here? October 31, 2017

Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture.
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Those of you who read me know that I am no fan of Facebook, for a wide variety of reasons.  I am not a member, and will never be one, even though it may hurt me professionally.  In short, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg is a megalomaniac who fancies Facebook as a modern religion, and himself as god, or at least the living prophet.

And regrettably, he may be right.  Because Facebook is far more than the “personal-ad-in-your-face” that I thought when I presented past objections.  Over the past 10 months, it has become pretty clear that Facebook is allowing itself to be used for purposes of influencing elections and sowing strife, sometimes violently.

The fact of the matter is that Zuckerberg and Facebook worship at the altar of the dollar, and everything else be damned.

Worse, from a technology standpoint, Facebook treats its probably-fatal flaws as mere software bugs, an inconvenience that it may fix if they rise up too far in the priority queue.

Still worse, the public-facing response is “We can’t be expected to police everything that happens on our site, can we?”

Well, yes, you can.  It is not “We can fix this,” or “We don’t think this is a problem.”  It is “You are at fault.”

In an earlier era of media (like, 10 years ago), publishers used to examine and vet every single advertisement.  Today it’s too hard?  That’s what Zuckerberg says.  That is the ultimate cop-out.  And that sick attitude is a side effect of worshiping at the altar of the dollar.

On Facebook, we are hearing louder echoes of our own voices.  Not different opinions.  And Facebook will not change that, because it will hurt their revenue.  And that is wrong in the most fundamental way.

So where do we go from here?  I would like to argue for people to stop using Facebook completely, but I know that’s not going to happen.  Maybe we should just be using Facebook to keep in touch with friends, as was originally intended.  We really don’t have ten thousand friends; I have about 900 connections on LinkedIn, and probably don’t even remember half of them.  And I don’t read news from them.

Can we possibly cool the addiction that millions of people seem to have to Facebook?  I don’t know, but for the sake of our future I think we need to try.