#@ any and all techbros who may see this: i hate you i hate you i hate you ihate you i hate you

[gutsfics]

tbh i think that the "is ai generated content art" argument is roughly the same as "is Duchamp's Fountain art". i think that the argument of if its art is what makes it art, because it is invoking some kind of feeling. starting a conversation. if that makes sense?

that being said, absolutely there is a time and a place for it (ie not replacing the work of paid artists). and it should only be trained on artsts who have consented to it.

i dont want to read fiction made by ai bc if you didn't take the time to write something, why should i take the time to read it? and for non fiction, it'll be riddled with incorrect facts because an algorithm "decided" that this word is the most likely to go next in the sentence based on what it's database says, even if its factually incorrect.

one of my favorite pieces of art is an ai image that was sent to a company that makes paint-by-numbers, and then filled out by a person. the artist, tumblr user rigatonidanza, asks "is this art? at what point does it become art? can it never be art because its ai, or because its paint by numbers? is it art because it elicits a response from the viewer?"

the point of art is to make you think, and to make you feel. does it stop being art if its not made by human hands, the way algorithmically generated images are? is it not art if its something mass produced, made for intentions other than what the artist uses it for, like Fountain? even if looking at it makes you feel something? anything? even if that "something" is a negative emotion?

all that said. if you use generative algorithms as an excuse to not pay real artists, you are a human tar pit. may you always immedeatly stub your toe after it stops hurting from the last time you stubbed it.

[starboy8]

I absolutely hate AI as being a way too take people's jobs and I don't really wana get into an argument but I feel it's in bad faith to call off inspiration for being derivative. Isn't everything derivative? I don't like where AI is headed and as someone who has been struggling to get any kind of art related job for a year I feel it's only going to get worse for me.

But I also think AI is here to stay and maybe not in the way techbros thing it will but its going to stay regardless it's too powerful a tool unlike NFTs which where just was for people to earn money. Ai is a tool and people will use it longer because of that. So I think it is important to look at ethical and more practical uses for it. If people want to use it for inspiration I see that as valid the artwork isn't getting shared and while the ideas may be not completely orginal it's a bouncing off point. Like said above there are websites that already do that and you should use those but I also think if AI is here to stay using it as inspiration is a mostly harmless action. At least I think that's a more valid use than techbros who use it put of their hatred of artist and who all want us to work at McDonald's

AI advocates frustrate the hell out of me, because of their singleminded insistence that AI is solely a good thing and that everyone should adopt it and stop whining about it.

Like they just outright do not give a damn about the very real CONSEQUENCES, like the loss of jobs, the theft of other people's work to feed the egos of a bunch of wannabe grifters, the increasingly blurry lines between fact and fiction that is being created by these fake images... It's all "ME ME ME fuck anyone who isn't me, go back to McDonalds if you're an artist or someone who gets in the way of my instant gratification!"

Yeah, I mean that anon was obviously written as a wind up but nice to have someone playing that role so it can be rebutted properly. Before it was 'big data' then it was 'blockchain' then it was 'NFTs' then it was 'the Metaverse' now its 'Gen AI'. It's all just hype for hype's sake, and they don't really care about the social implications of any of it.

Hence why none of the 'pros' of AI are about making the world a better place, they want everyone to be able to generate their own movies with a few key words which is honestly boring as shit.

[anheliotrope-old]

much ado about munch replacements

I really really don’t like people who hate soylent and meal squares et al.

I don’t mean that they don’t like how it tastes. I mean that they don’t like these things on an almost philosophical basis.

There’s people who constantly hint at the idea that getting calories from something so divorced from the original food source is bad and degrading to the person, as if the meal square was actually a square of yummy Marxist-style alienation from the means of production, rotting the soul of the Consumer, or perhaps more cryptodruidistic reasoning.

Let’s quickly skip past the category of people who basically hate soylent simply because they think “techbros” are simply the worst thing since the Third Reich -- you can generally spot those by seeing if they hate the naming of the product or not.

The other category of criticism comes from people who just seem to have a high amount of undue skepticism as to whether these companies are being nutritionally responsible. I am saying its undue because they generally do not show this kind of skepticism to regular food companies or the absolute bogus that has come out of nutrition science in the past. No no no, that has to be reserved for these companies because they’re trying to make money off of a weird thing, how dare they.

Maybe these kinds of people are good in some sense, trying to keep companies accountable, but so far they’ve done more harm than good.

These busybodies who go on the internet to complain about how this product might be unhealthy and therefore must be really bad are ideological foot soldiers -- a sign that there is continued endorsement among the public for government agencies such as the CFIA in Canada to ban soylent.

The soylent ban can be mostly correctly summarized as a ban over mere issues with regulatory compliance -- the government wants certain things to be categorized as meal replacements and then wants meal replacements to fit certain, frankly, arbitrary standards.

The part where the ideology comes in is that most people think it is perfectly okay for an entire consumer base to lose access to a food they like. There must be some valid health reason, after all, right? And it’s more important for our government to keep us safe from techbros trying to feed us unsafe things.

But the techbros aren’t the people being hurt here, it’s the people who needed meal replacements and were benefiting from them that are hurt. People who the previously mentioned ideological foot soldiers like to pretend don’t exist.

You may think I’m making some of these people up, but just today I saw someone on HN describing the mere existence of mealsquares as “profoundly depressing”. Of course they were probably hinting at the fact that people should have enough time to feed themselves and that there’s something wrong with modern society that we feel we don’t have time for ourselves.

Okay, but have you considered that whatever is wrong with society is kind of independent of how fucking cool meal replacements are conceptually?

Maintaining human bodies when you don’t feel like it actually really really sucks. That’s one thing that’s actually degrading and alienating. To have to keep your meatsack self-copying rube goldberg machine of a mortal coil going when you’d rather do literally anything else.

Any project that tries to make that easier is good in my book. The only metric should be whether it succeeds or not at the low-level task, not whether it is philosophically sanctioned as being Good Living (TM).

And most of the time when I see people talking about this, I rarely see any mention about people who have trouble feeding themselves. From the “classically” disabled, to people with chronic fatigue, to people with bad executive function, a lot of people can have their lives be made easier by a well engineered meal replacement. Instead of that, I see articles framing soylent as being an out of touch product made by techbros for techbros. Which might be true of its marketing maybe? But the article writers almost always completely fail to separate soylent from the overall idea of meal replacement because they’re just looking for another article topic for this week, so they end up hitting indiscriminately.

So far, I’m not aware of any ban other than the one in Canada, so I don’t want to overblow the issue. And some of these products probably genuinely have some issues or tradeoffs, depending also on who’s consuming them. But also stay in your fucking lane and keep to doing productive things instead of throwing shade at a type of product because it doesn’t vibe with your political or lifestyle aesthetics. The world didn’t need so many articles about how you find meal replacements weirdly sketchy.

[victoriagloverstuff]

Is it time to remove Zuckerberg from (his) office? – TechCrunch

A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity at a worldwide scale.

Challenge accepted.

Here’s the thought experiment: Fixing Facebook 

We’ll start with Facebook because, while it’s by no means the only tech company whose platform contains a bottomless cesspit of problems, it is the most used social platform in the West; the de facto global monopoly outside China.

And, well, even Zuckerberg’ thinks it needs fixing. Or at least that its PR needs fixing — given he made “Fixing Facebook” his ‘personal challenge’ of the year this year — proof, if any more were needed, of his incredible capacity for sounding tone-deaf.

For a little more context on these annual personal challenges, Zuckerberg once previously set himself the challenge of reading a new book every two weeks. So it seems fair to ask: Is Facebook a 26-book sized fix?

If we’re talking in book metaphor terms, the challenge of fixing Facebook seems at least on the scale of the Library of Alexandria, say, given the volume of human content being daily fenced. It may, more likely, be multiple libraries of Alexandria. Just as, if Facebook content was housed in a physical library, the company would require considerably more real estate that the largest library of the ancient world to house its staggeringly-massive-and-expanding-by-the-second human content collection — which also of course forms the foundation of its business.

Zuckerberg himself has implied that his 2018 challenge — to fix the company he founded years before the iPhone arrived to supercharge the smartphone revolution and, down that line, mobilize Facebook’s societal ‘revolution’ — is his toughest yet, and likely to take at least two or three years before it bears fruit, not just the one. So Facebook’s founder is already managing our expectations and he’s barely even started.

In all likelihood, if Facebook were left alone to keep standing ethically aloof, shaping and distributing information at vast scale while simultaneously denying that’s editing — to enjoy another decade of unforgivably bad judgement calls (so, basically, to ‘self-regulate’; or, as the New York Times put it, for Zuckerberg to be educated at societal expense) — then his 2018 personal challenge would become just ‘Chapter One, Volume One’ in a neverending life’s ‘work-in-progress’.

Great for Mark, far less great for humans and democratic societies all over the world.

Frankly, there has to be a better way. So here’s an alternative plan for fixing Facebook — or at least a few big ideas to get policymakers’ juices flowing… Bear in mind this is a thought exercise so we make no suggestions for how to enact the plan — we’re just throwing ideas out there to get folks thinking.

Step 1: Goodbye network of networks

Facebook has been allowed to acquire several other social communication networks — most notably photo-focused social network Instagram [1BN monthly active users] and messaging app platform WhatsApp [1.5BN] — so Zuckerberg has not just ONE massively popular social network (Facebook: [2.2BN]) but a saccharine suite of eyeball-harvesting machines.

Last month he revealed his sunless empire casts its shadow across a full 2.5BN individuals if you factor in all his apps — albeit, that was an attempt to distract investors from the stock price car crash conference call that was to follow. But the staggering size of the empire is undeniable.

So the first part of fixing Facebook is really simple: No dominant social network should be allowed to possess (or continue to possess) multiple dominant social networks.

There’s literally no good argument for why this is good for anyone other than (in Facebook’s case) Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg’s shareholders. Which is zero reason not to do something that’s net good for the rest of humanity. On one level it’s just basic math.

Setting aside (for just a second) the tangible damages inflicted upon humans by unregulated social media platforms with zero editorial values and a threadbare minimum of morality which wafts like gauze in the slipstream of supercharged and continuously re-engineered growth and engagement engines that DO NOT FACTOR HUMAN COST into their algorithmic calculations — allowing their masters to preside over suprasocietal revenue stripping mega-platforms — which, to be clear, is our primary concern here — the damage to competition and innovation alone from Zuckerberg owning multiple social networks is both visible and quantifiable.

Just ask Snapchat. Because, well, you can’t ask the social networks that don’t exist because Zuckerberg commands a full flush of attention-harvesting networks. So take a good, long, hard look at all those Stories clones he’s copypasted right across his social network of social networks. Not very innovative is it?

And even if you don’t think mega-platforms cause harm by eroding civic and democratic values (against, well, plenty of evidence to the contrary), if you value creativity, competition and consumer choice it’s equally a no brainer to tend your markets in a way that allows multiple distinct networks to thrive, rather than let one megacorp get so powerful it’s essentially metastasized into a Borg-like entity capable of enslaving and/or destroying any challenger, idea or even value in its path. (And doing all that at the same time as monopolizing its users’ attention.)

We see this too in how Facebook applies its technology in a way that seeks to reshape laws in its business model’s favor. Because while individuals break laws, massively powerful megacorps merely lean their bulk to squash them into a more pleasing shape.

Facebook is not just spending big on lobbying lawmakers (and it sure is doing that), it’s using technology and the brute force of its platform to pound on and roll over the rule of law by deforming foundational tenets of society. Privacy being just one of them.

And it’s not doing this reshaping for the good of humanity. Oh no. While democratic societies have rules to protect the vulnerable and foster competition and choice because they are based on recognizing value in human life, Facebook’s motives are 100% self-interested and profit-driven.

The company wants to rewrite rules globally to further expand its bottom line. Hence its mission to pool all humans into a single monetizable bucket — no matter if people don’t exactly mesh together because people aren’t actually bits of data. If you want to be that reductive make soup, not a “global community”.

So step one to fixing Facebook is simple: Break up Zuckerberg’s empire.

In practical terms that means forcing Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp — at a bare minimum. A single network is necessarily less potent than a network of networks. And it becomes, at least theoretically possible for Facebook to be at risk from competitive forces.

You would also need to at keep a weather eye on social VR, in case Oculus needs to be taken out of Zuckerberg’s hands too. There’s less of an immediate imperative there, certainly. This VR cycle is still as dead as the tone of voice the Facebook founder used to describe the things his avatar was virtually taking in when he indulged in a bit of Puerto Rico disaster tourism for an Oculus product demo last year.

That said, there’s still a strong argument to say that Facebook, the dominant force of the social web and then the social mobile web, should not be allowed to shape and dictate even a nascent potential future disruptor in the same social technology sphere.

Not if you value diversity and creativity — and, well, a lot more besides.

But all these enforced sells-offs would just raise lots more money for Facebook! I hear you cry. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — so long as it gets, shall we say, well spent. The windfall could be used to fund a massive recruitment drive to properly resource Facebook’s business in every market where it operates.

And I do mean MASSIVE. Not the ‘10,000 extra security and moderation staff’ Facebook has said will hire by the end of this year (raising the headcount it has working on these critical tasks to around 20k in total).

To be anywhere near capable of properly contextualizing content across a platform that’s actively used by 2BN+ humans — and therefore to be able to rapidly and effectively spot and quash malicious manipulation, hateful conduct and so on, and thus responsibly manage and sustain a genuine global ‘community’ — the company would likely need to add hundreds of thousands of content reviewers/moderators. Which would be very expensive indeed.

Yet Facebook paid a cool $19BN for WhatsApp back in 2014 — so an enforced sell off of its other networks should raise a truck tonne of cash to held fund a vastly larger ‘trust and safety’ personnel bill. (While AI systems and technologies can help with the moderation challenge, Zuckerberg himself has admitted that AI alone won’t scale to the content challenge for “many years” to come — if indeed it can scale at all.)

Unfortunately there’s another problem though. The human labor involved in carrying out content moderation across Facebook’s 2BN+ user mega-platform is ethically horrifying because the people who Facebook contracts for ‘after the fact’ moderation necessarily live neck deep in its cesspit. Their sweating toil is to keep paddling the shit so Facebook’s sewers don’t back up entirely and flood the platform with it.

So, in a truly ideal ‘fixed Facebook’ scenario, there wouldn’t be a need for this kind of dehumanizing, industrialized content review system — which necessitates that eyes be averted and empathy disengaged from any considerations of a traumatized ‘clean up’ workforce.

Much like Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Zuckerberg’s mega-platform requires an unfortunate underclass of worker doing its dirty work. And just as the existence of slaves in Utopia made it evident that the ‘utopian vision’ being presented was not really all it seemed, Facebook’s outsourced teams of cheap labor — whose day job is to sit and watch videos of human beheadings, torture, violence etc; or make a microsecond stress-judgement on whether a piece of hate speech is truly hateful enough to be rendered incapable of monetization and pulled from the platform — the awful cost on both sides of that human experience undermines Zuckerberg’s claim that he’s “building global community”.

Moore coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek — and its two components suggest an intended translation of ‘no place’. Or perhaps, better yet, it was supposed to be a pun — as Margaret Atwood has suggested — meaning something along the lines of ‘the good place that simply doesn’t exist’. Which might be a good description for Zuckerberg’s “global community”.

So we’ll come back to that.

Because the next step in the plan should help cut the Facebook moderation challenge down to a more manageable size…

Step 2) Break up Facebook into lots of market specific Facebooks

Instead of there being just one Facebook (comprised of two core legal entities: Facebook USA and Facebook International, in Ireland), it’s time to break up Facebook’s business into hundreds of market specific Facebooks that can really start to serve their local communities. You could go further still and subdivide at a state, county or community level.

A global social network is an oxymoron. Humans are individuals and humanity is made up of all sorts of peoples, communities and groupings. So to suggest the whole of humanity needs to co-exist on the exact same platform, under the exact same overarching set of ‘community standards’, is — truly — the stuff of megalomaniacs.

To add insult to societal and cultural injury, Facebook — the company that claims it’s doing this (while ignoring the ‘awkward’ fact that what it’s building isn’t functioning equally everywhere, even in its own backyard) — has an executive team that’s almost exclusively white and male, and steeped in a very particular Valley ‘Kool Aid’ techno-utopian mindset that’s wrapped in the U.S. flag and bound to the U.S. constitution.

Which is another way of saying that’s the polar opposite of thinking global.

Facebook released its fifth annual diversity report this year which revealed it making little progress in increasing diversity over the past five years. In senior leadership roles, Facebook’s 2018 skew is 70:30 male female, and a full 69.7% white. While the company was fully 77% male and 74% white in 2014.

Facebook’s ongoing lack of diversity is not representative of the U.S. population, let alone reflective of the myriad regions its product reaches around the planet. So the idea that an executive team with such an inexorably narrow, U.S.-focused perspective could meaningfully — let alone helpfully — serve the whole of humanity is a nonsense. And the fact that Zuckerberg is still talking in those terms merely spotlights an abject lack of corporate diversity and global perspective at his company.

If he genuinely believes his own “global community” rhetoric he’s failing even harder than he looks. Most probably, though, it’s just a convenient marketing label to wallpaper the growth strategy that’s delivered for Facebook’s shareholders for years — by the company pushing into and dominating international markets yet without making commensurate investments in resourcing its business in international markets….

Fascinating detail from @karaswisher interview w/ Zuck where he admits Fb's margin comes from rest of world – i.e. where fb is under-resourced vs impacts/damage its platforms can have – and not from the US. So, tl;dr, fb's profitability is reliant on fb's lack of responsibility pic.twitter.com/UNG7OFssjF

— Natasha (@riptari) July 19, 2018

This facet of Facebook’s business becomes especially problematic when you consider how the company has been pouring money into subsidizing (or seeking to) Internet access in emerging markets.

Initially via its Internet.org ‘Free Basics’ initiative which was marketed as a ‘humanitarian’, quasi-philanthropic mission to ‘wire the world’ — though plenty of outsiders and some target countries viewed it not as charity but as a self-serving and competitive-crushing business development tactic. (Including India — which blocked Free Basics, but not before Facebook had spent millions on ads trying to get locals to lobby the regulator on its behalf).

More recently the company has been putting money into telecom infrastructure a bit less loudly — presumably hoping a less immediately self-serving approach to investing in infrastructure in target growth markets will avoid another highly politicized controversy.

It’s more wallpapering though: Connectivity investments are a business growth strategy predicated on Facebook removing connectivity barriers that stand in the way of Facebook onboarding more eyeballs.

And given the amounts of money Facebooks has been willing to spend to try to lodge its product in the hands of more new Internet users — to the point where, in some markets, Facebook effectively is the Internet — it’s even less forgivable that the company has failed to properly resource its international operations and stop its products from having some truly tragic consequences.

The cost to humanity for Facebook failing to operate with due care is painfully visible but difficult to quantify.

Not that Zuckerberg has let those inconvenient truths stop him from continuing to suggest he’s the man to build a community for the planet. But again that rather implies Facebook’s problems grow out of Facebook’s lack of external perspective.

Aside from the fact that we are all equally human, there is no one homogenous human community that spans the entire world. So when Zuckerberg talks about Facebook’s ‘global community’ he is, in effect, saying nothing — or saying something almost entirely meaningless as to render down to a platitudinous sludge. (At least unless his desire is indeed a Borg-esque absorption of other cultures — into a ‘resistance is futile’ homogenous ‘Californormification’ of the planet. And we must surely hope it’s not. Although Facebook’s Free Basics have been accused of amounting to digital colonialism.)

Zuckerberg does seem to have quasi-realized the contradiction lurking at the the tin heart of his ‘global’ endeavor, though. Which is why he’s talked suggestively about creating a ‘Supreme Court of Facebook‘ — i.e. to try to reboot the pitifully unfit for purpose governance structure. (Although talk of ‘community-oriented governance’ has neither been firmed up nor formalized into a tangible structural reform plan.)

While the notion of a Supreme Court of Facebook, especially, does risk sounding worryingly like Zuckerberg fancies his own personal Star Chamber, the fact he’s even saying this sort of stuff shows he knows Facebook has planet-straddling problems that are far, far too big for its minimalist Libertarian ‘guardrails’ to manage or control. And in turn that suggests the event horizon of scaling Facebook’s business model has been reached. Hello $120BN market cap blackhole.

“It’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world,” Zuckerberg said earlier THIS YEAR — 2018! — in what must surely count as the one of the tardiest enlightenments of a well educated public person in the Western world, period.

“I’ve been working on and thinking through,” he continued his mental perambulation. “How can you set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world?”

Well, Mark, here’s an idea to factor into your thinking: Facebook’s problem is Facebook’s massive size.

So why not chop the platform up into market specific operations that are free to make some of their own decisions and let them develop diverse corporate cultures of their own. Most importantly empower them to be operationally sensitive to the needs of local communities — and so well placed to responsively serve them.

Imagine the Facebook brand as a sort of loose ‘franchise’, with each little Facebook at liberty to intelligently adapt the menu to local tastes. And each of these ‘content eateries’ taking pride in the interior of its real estate, with dedicated managers who make their presence felt and whose jobs is to ensure great facilities but no violent food fights.

There would also need to be some core principles too, of course. A set of democratic and civic values that all the little Facebooks are bound to protect — to push back against attempts by states or concerted external forces seeking to maliciously hijack and derail speech.

But switch around the current reality — a hulkingly massive platform attached to a relatively tiny (in resources terms) business operation — and the slavering jabberwocky that Zuckerberg is now on a personal mission to slay might well cease to exist, as multiple messy human challenges get cut down to a more manageable size. Not every single content judgement call on Facebook needs to scale planet-wide.

Multiple, well resourced market-specific Facebooks staffed locally so they can pro-actively spot problems and manage their communities would not be the same business at all. Facebook would become an even more biodiverse ecosystem — of linked but tonally distinct communities — which could even, in time, diverge a bit on the feature front, via adding non-core extras, based on market specific appetites and tastes.

There would obviously have to be basic core social function interoperability — so that individual users of different Facebooks could still connect and communicate. But beyond a bit of interplay (a sort of ‘Facebook Basics’) why should there be a requirement that everyone’s Facebook experience be exactly the same?

While Facebook talks as if it has a single set of community standards, the reality is fuzzier. For example it applies stricter hate speech rules to content moderation in a market like Germany, which passed a social media hate speech law last year. Those sorts of exceptions aren’t going to go away either; as more lawmakers wake up to the challenges posed by the platform more demands will be made to regulate the content on the platform.

So, Zuckerberg, why not step actively into a process of embracing greater localization — in a way that’s sensitive to cultural and societal norms — and use the accrued political capital from that to invest in defending the platform’s core principles?

This approach won’t work in every market, clearly. But allowing for a greater tonality of content — a more risqué French Facebook, say, vs the ‘no-nipples please’ U.S. flavor — coupled with greater sensitivity to market mood and feedback could position Facebook to work with democracies and strengthen civic and cultural values, instead of trying to barge its way along by unilaterally imposing the U.S. constitution on the rest of the planet.

Facebook as it is now, globally scaled but under-resourced, is not in a position to enforce its own community standards. It only does so when or if it receives repeat complaints (and even then it won’t always act on them).

Or when a market has passed legislation enforcing action with a regime of fines (a recent report by a UK parliamentary committee, examining the democratic implications of social media fueled disinformation, notes that one in six of Facebook’s moderators now works in Germany — citing that as “practical evidence that legislation can work”).

So there are very visible cracks in both its claim to be “building global community” or even that it has community standards at all, given it doesn’t pro-actively enforce them (in most markets). So why not embrace a full fragmentation of its platform — and let a thousand little blue ships set sail!

And if Facebook really wants one community principle to set as its pole star, one rule to rule them all (and to vanquish its existential jabberwocky), it should swear to put life before data.

Locally tuned, culturally sensitive Facebooks that stand up for democratic values and civic standards could help rework the moderation challenge — removing the need for Facebook to have the equivalent of sweat shops based on outsourcing repeat human exposure to violent and toxic content.

This element is one of the ugliest sides of the social media platform business. But with empowered, smaller businesses operating in closer proximities to the communities being served, Facebook stands a better chance of getting on top of its content problems — getting out of a reactive crisis mode piled high with problems where it’s currently stuck to taking up a position in the community intelligence vanguard where its workers can root out damaging abuse before it gets to go viral, metastasize and wreak wider societal harms.

Proper community management could also, over time, encourage a more positive sharing environment to develop — where posting hateful stuff doesn’t get rewarded with feedback loops. Certainly not algorithmically, as it indeed has been.

As an additional measure, a portion of the financial windfall gained from selling off Facebook’s other social networks could be passed directly to independent trustees appointed to the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation for spending on projects intended to counter the corrosive effects of social media on information veracity and authenticity — such as by funding school age educational programs in critical thinking.

Indeed, UK lawmakers have already called for a social media levy for a similar purpose.

Step 3) Open the black boxes

There would still be a Facebook board and a Facebook exec team in a head office in California sitting atop all these community-oriented Facebooks — which, while operationally liberated, would still be making use of its core technology and getting limited corporate steerage. So there would still be a need for regulators to understand what Facebook’s code is doing.

Algorithmic accountability of platform technologies is essential. Regulators need to be able to see the inputs underlying the information hierarchies that these AI engines generate, and compare those against the outputs of that shaping. Which means audits. So opening the commercial black boxes — and the data holdings — to regulatory oversight.

Discrimination is easier to get away with in darkness. But Mega-platforms have shielded their commercial IP from public scrutiny and it’s only when damaging effects have surfaced in the public consciousness that users have got a glimpse of what’s been going on.

Facebook’s defense has been to say it was naive in the face of malicious activity like Russian-backed election meddling. That’s hardly an argument for more obscurity and more darkness. If you lack awareness and perspective, ask for expert help Mark.

Lawmakers have also accused the company of willfully obstructing good faith attempts at investigating scandals such as Cambridge Analytica data misuse, Kremlin-backed election interference, or how foreign money flowed into its platform seeking to influence the UK’s Brexit referendum result.

Willful obstruction to good faith, democratically minded political interrogation really isn’t a sustainable strategy. Nor an ethically defensible one.

Given the vast, society-deforming size of these platforms politicians are simply not just going to give up and go home. There will have to be standards to ensure these mega-powerful information distribution systems aren’t at risk of being gamed or being biased or otherwise misused and those standards will have to be enforced. And the enforcement must also be able to be checked and verified. So, yes, more audits.

Mega-platforms have also benefited from self-sustaining feedback loops based on their vast reach and data holdings, allowing them to lock in and double down on a market dominating position by, for example, applying self-learning algorithms trained on their own user data or via A/B testing at vast, vast scale to optimize UX design to maximize engagement and monopolize attention.

User choice in this scenario is radically denuded, and competition increasingly gets pushed back and even locked out, without such easy access to equivalently massive pools of data.

If a mega-platform has optimized the phasing and positioning of — for example — a consent button by running comparative tests to determine which combination yields the fewest opt outs, is it fair or right to the user being asked to ‘choose’? Are people being treated with respect? Or, well, like lab rats?

Breaking Facebook’s platform into lots of Facebooks could also be an opportunity to rethink its data monopoly. To argue that its central business should not have an absolute right to the data pool generated by each smaller, market specific Facebook.

Part of the regulatory oversight could include a system of accountability over how Facebook’s parent business can and cannot use pooled data holdings.

If Facebook’s executive team had to make an ethics application to a relevant regulatory panel to request and justify access each time the parent business wanted to dip into the global data pool or tap data from a particular regional cluster of Facebooks, how might that change thought processes within the leadership team?

Facebook’s own (now former) CSO, Alex Stamos, identified problems baked into the current executive team’s ‘business as usual’ thinking — writing emphatically in an internal memo earlier this year: “We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people… We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about challenges and what we are doing to fix them.”

It seems unlikely that an application to the relevant regulators asking for ‘Europe-wide data so we can A/B test user consent flows to get more Europeans to switch on facial recognition‘ would pass the ‘life before data’ community standard test.

And, well, it’s well established that the fact of being watched and knowing it’s happening has the power to change behavior. After all, Facebook’s platform is a major testament to that.

So it may be more that it’s external guidance — rather than a new internal governance model — which Facebook sorely lacks. Some external watchers to watch its internal watchmen.

Step 4) Remove Zuckerberg from (his) office

Public companies are supposed to be answerable to their shareholders. Thanks to the share structure that Mark Zuckerberg put in place at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is answerable to no one except himself. And despite Facebook’s years of scandals, he does not appear to have ever felt the urge to sack himself.

When the idea of personal accountability was brought up with him, in a recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher, he had a moment of making a light joke of it — quipping “do you really want me to fire myself right now? For the news?” before falling back on his line that: “I think we should do what’s gonna be right for the community.”

And, you know what, the joke was exactly right: The idea that Zuckerberg would terminate his own position is both laughable and ludicrous. It is a joke.

Which means Facebook’s executive structure is also a joke because there is zero accountability at the highest level — beyond Mark’s personal threshold for shame or empathy — and that’s now a global problem.

Zuckerberg has more power than most of the world’s elected politicians (and arguably some of the world’s political leaders). Yet he can’t be kicked out of his office, nor lose his CEO seat at any ballot box. He’s a Facebook fixture — short of a literal criminal conviction or otherwise reputation terminating incident.

While you could argue that not being answerable to the mercenary whims of shareholder pressure is a good thing because it frees Zuckerberg to raise business transformation needs above returns-focused investor considerations (albeit, let’s see how his nerve holds after that $120BN investor punch) — his record in the CEO’s chair counters any suggestion that he’s a person who makes radical and sweeping changes to Facebook’s modus operandi. On the contrary, he’s shown himself a master of saying ‘oops we did it again!’ and then getting right back to screwing up as usual.

He’s also demonstrated a consistent disbelief that Facebook’s platform creates problems — preferring to couch connecting people as a glorious humanitarian mission from whence life-affirming marriages and children flow. Rather than seeing risks in putting global megaphones in the hands of anyone with an urge to shout.

As recently as November 2016 he was still dismissing the idea that political disinformation spread via Facebook had been in any way impactful on the US presidential election — as a “pretty crazy idea” — yet his own business had staffed divisions dedicated to working with US politicians to get their campaign messages out. It shouldn’t be rocket science to see a contradiction there. But until very recently Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t.

The fact of him also being the original founder of the business does not help in the push for disruptive change to Facebook itself. The best person to fix a radically broken product is unlikely to be the person whose entire adult life has been conjoined to a late night college dorm room idea spat online — and then which ended up spinning up and out into a fortune. And then into a major, major global mess.

The ‘no better person than me to fix it’ line can be countered by pointing to Zuckerberg’s personal history of playing fast and loose with other people’s data (from the “dumb fucks” comment all the way back in his student days to years of deliberate platform choices at Facebook that made people’s information public by default); and by suggesting entrenched challenges would surely benefit from fresh eyes, new thinking and a broader perspective.

Add to that, Zuckerberg has arguably boxed himself in, politically speaking, thanks to a series of disingenuous, misleading and abstruse claims and statements made to lawmakers — limiting his room for manoeuvre or for rethinking his approach; let alone being able to genuinely compromise or make honest platform changes.

His opportunity to be radically honest about Facebook’s problems probably passed years and years back — when he was busy working hard on his personal challenge to wear a tie everyday [2009]. Or only eat animals he kills himself [2011].

By 2013’s personal challenge, it’s possible that Zuckerberg had sensed something new in the data stream that was maybe coming down the pipes at him — as he set himself the challenge of expanding his personal horizons (not that he put it that way) by “meeting a new person every day who does not work at Facebook”.

Meeting a new person every day who did work at Facebook would have been far too easy, see.

Is it even possible to think outside the box when your entire adult life has been spent tooling away inside the same one?

Step 5) Over to you… 

What are your radical solutions for fixing Facebook? Should Zuckerberg stay or should he go? What do you want lawmakers to do about social media? What kinds of policy interventions might set these mega-platforms on a less fractious path? Or do you believe all this trouble on social media is a storm in a teacup that will blow over if we but screw our courage to the sticking place and wait for everyone to catch up with the cardinal Internet truth that nothing online is what it seems…

Cool read from TC Source Link

[technicalsolutions88]

A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity at a worldwide scale.

Challenge accepted.

Here’s the thought experiment: Fixing Facebook 

We’ll start with Facebook because, while it’s by no means the only tech company whose platform contains a bottomless cesspit of problems, it is the most used social platform in the West; the de facto global monopoly outside China.

And, well, even Zuckerberg’ thinks it needs fixing. Or at least that its PR needs fixing — given he made “Fixing Facebook” his ‘personal challenge’ of the year this year — proof, if any more were needed, of his incredible capacity for sounding tone-deaf.

For a little more context on these annual personal challenges, Zuckerberg once previously set himself the challenge of reading a new book every two weeks. So it seems fair to ask: Is Facebook a 26-book sized fix?

If we’re talking in book metaphor terms, the challenge of fixing Facebook seems at least on the scale of the Library of Alexandria, say, given the volume of human content being daily fenced. It may, more likely, be multiple libraries of Alexandria. Just as, if Facebook content was housed in a physical library, the company would require considerably more real estate that the largest library of the ancient world to house its staggeringly-massive-and-expanding-by-the-second human content collection — which also of course forms the foundation of its business.

Zuckerberg himself has implied that his 2018 challenge — to fix the company he founded years before the iPhone arrived to supercharge the smartphone revolution and, down that line, mobilize Facebook’s societal ‘revolution’ — is his toughest yet, and likely to take at least two or three years before it bears fruit, not just the one. So Facebook’s founder is already managing our expectations and he’s barely even started.

In all likelihood, if Facebook were left alone to keep standing ethically aloof, shaping and distributing information at vast scale while simultaneously denying that’s editing — to enjoy another decade of unforgivably bad judgement calls (so, basically, to ‘self-regulate’; or, as the New York Times put it, for Zuckerberg to be educated at societal expense) — then his 2018 personal challenge would become just ‘Chapter One, Volume One’ in a neverending life’s ‘work-in-progress’.

Great for Mark, far less great for humans and democratic societies all over the world.

Frankly, there has to be a better way. So here’s an alternative plan for fixing Facebook — or at least a few big ideas to get policymakers’ juices flowing… Bear in mind this is a thought exercise so we make no suggestions for how to enact the plan — we’re just throwing ideas out there to get folks thinking.

  Step 1: Goodbye network of networks

Facebook has been allowed to acquire several other social communication networks — most notably photo-focused social network Instagram [1BN monthly active users] and messaging app platform WhatsApp [1.5BN] — so Zuckerberg has not just ONE massively popular social network (Facebook: [2.2BN]) but a saccharine suite of eyeball-harvesting machines.

Last month he revealed his sunless empire casts its shadow across a full 2.5BN individuals if you factor in all his apps — albeit, that was an attempt to distract investors from the stock price car crash conference call that was to follow. But the staggering size of the empire is undeniable.

So the first part of fixing Facebook is really simple: No dominant social network should be allowed to possess (or continue to possess) multiple dominant social networks.

There’s literally no good argument for why this is good for anyone other than (in Facebook’s case) Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg’s shareholders. Which is zero reason not to do something that’s net good for the rest of humanity. On one level it’s just basic math.

Setting aside (for just a second) the tangible damages inflicted upon humans by unregulated social media platforms with zero editorial values and a threadbare minimum of morality which wafts like gauze in the slipstream of supercharged and continuously re-engineered growth and engagement engines that DO NOT FACTOR HUMAN COST into their algorithmic calculations — allowing their masters to preside over suprasocietal revenue stripping mega-platforms — which, to be clear, is our primary concern here — the damage to competition and innovation alone from Zuckerberg owning multiple social networks is both visible and quantifiable.

Just ask Snapchat. Because, well, you can’t ask the social networks that don’t exist because Zuckerberg commands a full flush of attention-harvesting networks. So take a good, long, hard look at all those Stories clones he’s copypasted right across his social network of social networks. Not very innovative is it?

And even if you don’t think mega-platforms cause harm by eroding civic and democratic values (against, well, plenty of evidence to the contrary), if you value creativity, competition and consumer choice it’s equally a no brainer to tend your markets in a way that allows multiple distinct networks to thrive, rather than let one megacorp get so powerful it’s essentially metastasized into a Borg-like entity capable of enslaving and/or destroying any challenger, idea or even value in its path. (And doing all that at the same time as monopolizing its users’ attention.)

We see this too in how Facebook applies its technology in a way that seeks to reshape laws in its business model’s favor. Because while individuals break laws, massively powerful megacorps merely lean their bulk to squash them into a more pleasing shape.

Facebook is not just spending big on lobbying lawmakers (and it sure is doing that), it’s using technology and the brute force of its platform to pound on and roll over the rule of law by deforming foundational tenets of society. Privacy being just one of them.

And it’s not doing this reshaping for the good of humanity. Oh no. While democratic societies have rules to protect the vulnerable and foster competition and choice because they are based on recognizing value in human life, Facebook’s motives are 100% self-interested and profit-driven.

The company wants to rewrite rules globally to further expand its bottom line. Hence its mission to pool all humans into a single monetizable bucket — no matter if people don’t exactly mesh together because people aren’t actually bits of data. If you want to be that reductive make soup, not a “global community”.

So step one to fixing Facebook is simple: Break up Zuckerberg’s empire.

In practical terms that means forcing Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp — at a bare minimum. A single network is necessarily less potent than a network of networks. And it becomes, at least theoretically possible for Facebook to be at risk from competitive forces.

You would also need to at keep a weather eye on social VR, in case Oculus needs to be taken out of Zuckerberg’s hands too. There’s less of an immediate imperative there, certainly. This VR cycle is still as dead as the tone of voice the Facebook founder used to describe the things his avatar was virtually taking in when he indulged in a bit of Puerto Rico disaster tourism for an Oculus product demo last year.

That said, there’s still a strong argument to say that Facebook, the dominant force of the social web and then the social mobile web, should not be allowed to shape and dictate even a nascent potential future disruptor in the same social technology sphere.

Not if you value diversity and creativity — and, well, a lot more besides.

But all these enforced sells-offs would just raise lots more money for Facebook! I hear you cry. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — so long as it gets, shall we say, well spent. The windfall could be used to fund a massive recruitment drive to properly resource Facebook’s business in every market where it operates.

And I do mean MASSIVE. Not the ‘10,000 extra security and moderation staff’ Facebook has said will hire by the end of this year (raising the headcount it has working on these critical tasks to around 20k in total).

To be anywhere near capable of properly contextualizing content across a platform that’s actively used by 2BN+ humans — and therefore to be able to rapidly and effectively spot and quash malicious manipulation, hateful conduct and so on, and thus responsibly manage and sustain a genuine global ‘community’ — the company would likely need to add hundreds of thousands of content reviewers/moderators. Which would be very expensive indeed.

Yet Facebook paid a cool $19BN for WhatsApp back in 2014 — so an enforced sell off of its other networks should raise a truck tonne of cash to held fund a vastly larger ‘trust and safety’ personnel bill. (While AI systems and technologies can help with the moderation challenge, Zuckerberg himself has admitted that AI alone won’t scale to the content challenge for “many years” to come — if indeed it can scale at all.)

Unfortunately there’s another problem though. The human labor involved in carrying out content moderation across Facebook’s 2BN+ user mega-platform is ethically horrifying because the people who Facebook contracts for ‘after the fact’ moderation necessarily live neck deep in its cesspit. Their sweating toil is to keep paddling the shit so Facebook’s sewers don’t back up entirely and flood the platform with it.

So, in a truly ideal ‘fixed Facebook’ scenario, there wouldn’t be a need for this kind of dehumanizing, industrialized content review system — which necessitates that eyes be averted and empathy disengaged from any considerations of a traumatized ‘clean up’ workforce.

Much like Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Zuckerberg’s mega-platform requires an unfortunate underclass of worker doing its dirty work. And just as the existence of slaves in Utopia made it evident that the ‘utopian vision’ being presented was not really all it seemed, Facebook’s outsourced teams of cheap labor — whose day job is to sit and watch videos of human beheadings, torture, violence etc; or make a microsecond stress-judgement on whether a piece of hate speech is truly hateful enough to be rendered incapable of monetization and pulled from the platform — the awful cost on both sides of that human experience undermines Zuckerberg’s claim that he’s “building global community”.

Moore coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek — and its two components suggest an intended translation of ‘no place’. Or perhaps, better yet, it was supposed to be a pun — as Margaret Atwood has suggested — meaning something along the lines of ‘the good place that simply doesn’t exist’. Which might be a good description for Zuckerberg’s “global community”.

So we’ll come back to that.

Because the next step in the plan should help cut the Facebook moderation challenge down to a more manageable size…

  Step 2) Break up Facebook into lots of market specific Facebooks

Instead of there being just one Facebook (comprised of two core legal entities: Facebook USA and Facebook International, in Ireland), it’s time to break up Facebook’s business into hundreds of market specific Facebooks that can really start to serve their local communities. You could go further still and subdivide at a state, county or community level.

A global social network is an oxymoron. Humans are individuals and humanity is made up of all sorts of peoples, communities and groupings. So to suggest the whole of humanity needs to co-exist on the exact same platform, under the exact same overarching set of ‘community standards’, is — truly — the stuff of megalomaniacs.

To add insult to societal and cultural injury, Facebook — the company that claims it’s doing this (while ignoring the ‘awkward’ fact that what it’s building isn’t functioning equally everywhere, even in its own backyard) — has an executive team that’s almost exclusively white and male, and steeped in a very particular Valley ‘Kool Aid’ techno-utopian mindset that’s wrapped in the U.S. flag and bound to the U.S. constitution.

Which is another way of saying that’s the polar opposite of thinking global.

Facebook released its fifth annual diversity report this year which revealed it making little progress in increasing diversity over the past five years. In senior leadership roles, Facebook’s 2018 skew is 70:30 male female, and a full 69.7% white. While the company was fully 77% male and 74% white in 2014.

Facebook’s ongoing lack of diversity is not representative of the U.S. population, let alone reflective of the myriad regions its product reaches around the planet. So the idea that an executive team with such an inexorably narrow, U.S.-focused perspective could meaningfully — let alone helpfully — serve the whole of humanity is a nonsense. And the fact that Zuckerberg is still talking in those terms merely spotlights an abject lack of corporate diversity and global perspective at his company.

If he genuinely believes his own “global community” rhetoric he’s failing even harder than he looks. Most probably, though, it’s just a convenient marketing label to wallpaper the growth strategy that’s delivered for Facebook’s shareholders for years — by the company pushing into and dominating international markets.

Yet, and here’s the rub, without making commensurate investments in resourcing its business in international markets….

Fascinating detail from @karaswisher interview w/ Zuck where he admits Fb's margin comes from rest of world – i.e. where fb is under-resourced vs impacts/damage its platforms can have – and not from the US. So, tl;dr, fb's profitability is reliant on fb's lack of responsibility pic.twitter.com/UNG7OFssjF

— Natasha (@riptari) July 19, 2018

This facet of Facebook’s business becomes especially problematic when you consider how the company has been pouring money into subsidizing (or seeking to) Internet access in emerging markets. So it is spending lots and lots of money, just not on keeping people safe.

Initially, Facebook spent money to expand the reach of its platform via its Internet.org ‘Free Basics’ initiative which was marketed as a ‘humanitarian’, quasi-philanthropic mission to ‘wire the world’ — though plenty of outsiders and some target countries viewed it not as charity but as a self-serving and competitive-crushing business development tactic. (Including India — which blocked Free Basics, but not before Facebook had spent millions on ads trying to get locals to lobby the regulator on its behalf).

More recently it’s been putting money into telecom infrastructure a bit less loudly — presumably hoping a less immediately self-serving approach to investing in infrastructure in target growth markets will avoid another highly politicized controversy.

It’s more wallpapering though: Connectivity investments are a business growth strategy predicated on Facebook removing connectivity barriers that stand in the way of Facebook onboarding more eyeballs.

And given the amounts of money Facebooks has been willing to spend to try to lodge its product in the hands of more new Internet users — to the point where, in some markets, Facebook effectively is the Internet — it’s even less forgivable that the company has failed to properly resource its international operations and stop its products from having some truly tragic consequences.

The cost to humanity for Facebook failing to operate with due care is painfully visible and horribly difficult to quantify.

Not that Zuckerberg has let those inconvenient truths stop him from continuing to suggest he’s the man to build a community for the planet. But again that rather implies Facebook’s problems grow out of Facebook’s lack of external perspective.

Aside from the fact that we are all equally human, there is no one homogenous human community that spans the entire world. So when Zuckerberg talks about Facebook’s ‘global community’ he is, in effect, saying nothing — or saying something almost entirely meaningless as to render down to a platitudinous sludge. (At least unless his desire is indeed a Borg-esque absorption of other cultures — into a ‘resistance is futile’ homogenous ‘Californormification’ of the planet. And we must surely hope it’s not. Although Facebook’s Free Basics have been accused of amounting to digital colonialism.)

Zuckerberg does seem to have quasi-realized the contradiction lurking at the the tin heart of his ‘global’ endeavor, though. Which is why he’s talked suggestively about creating a ‘Supreme Court of Facebook‘ — i.e. to try to reboot the pitifully unfit for purpose governance structure.

But talk of ‘community-oriented governance’ has neither been firmed up nor formalized into a tangible structural reform plan.

While the notion of a Supreme Court of Facebook, especially, does risk sounding worryingly like Zuckerberg fancies his own personal Star Chamber, the fact he’s even saying this sort of stuff shows he knows Facebook has planet-straddling problems that are far, far too big for its minimalist Libertarian ‘guardrails’ to manage or control. And in turn that suggests the event horizon of scaling Facebook’s business model has been reached.

Aka: Hello $120BN market cap blackhole.

“It’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world,” Zuckerberg said earlier THIS YEAR — 2018! — in what must surely count as the one of the tardiest enlightenments of a well educated public person in the Western world, period.

“I’ve been working on and thinking through,” he continued his mental perambulation. “How can you set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world?”

Well, Mark, here’s an idea to factor into your thinking: Facebook’s problem is Facebook’s massive size.

So why not chop the platform up into market specific operations that are free to make some of their own decisions and let them develop diverse corporate cultures of their own. Most importantly empower them to be operationally sensitive to the needs of local communities — and so well placed to responsively serve them.

Imagine the Facebook brand as a sort of loose ‘franchise’, with each little Facebook at liberty to intelligently adapt the menu to local tastes. And each of these ‘content eateries’ taking pride in the interior of its real estate, with dedicated managers who make their presence felt and whose jobs are to ensure great facilities but no violent food fights.

There would also need to be some core principles too, of course. A set of democratic and civic values that all the little Facebooks are bound to protect — to push back against attempts by states or concerted external forces seeking to maliciously hijack and derail speech.

But switch around the current reality — a hulkingly massive platform attached to a relatively tiny (in resources terms) business operation — and the slavering jabberwocky that Zuckerberg is now on a personal mission to slay might well cease to exist, as multiple messy human challenges get cut down to a more manageable size. Not every single content judgement call on Facebook needs to scale planet-wide.

Multiple, well resourced market-specific Facebooks staffed locally so they can pro-actively spot problems and manage their communities would not be the same business at all. Facebook would become an even more biodiverse ecosystem — of linked but tonally distinct communities — which could even, in time, diverge a bit on the feature front, via adding non-core extras, based on market specific appetites and tastes.

There would obviously have to be basic core social function interoperability — so that individual users of different Facebooks could still connect and communicate. But beyond a bit of interplay (a sort of ‘Facebook Basics’) why should there be a requirement that everyone’s Facebook experience be exactly the same?

While Facebook talks as if it has a single set of community standards, the reality is fuzzier. For example it applies stricter hate speech rules to content moderation in a market like Germany, which passed a social media hate speech law last year. Those sorts of exceptions aren’t going to go away either; as more lawmakers wake up to the challenges posed by the platform it’s clear more demands will be placed on Facebook to regulate the content on the platform.

So, Zuckerberg, why not step actively into a process of embracing greater localization — in a way that’s sensitive to cultural and societal norms — and use the accrued political capital from that to invest in defending the platform’s core principles?

This approach won’t work in every market, clearly. But allowing for a greater tonality of content — a more risqué French Facebook, say, vs the ‘no-nipples please’ U.S. flavor — coupled with greater sensitivity to market mood and feedback could position Facebook to work with democracies and strengthen civic and cultural values, instead of trying to barge its way along by unilaterally imposing the U.S. constitution on the rest of the planet.

Facebook as it is now, globally scaled but under-resourced, is not in a position to enforce its own community standards. It only does so when or if it receives repeat complaints (and even then it won’t always act on them).

Or when a market has passed legislation enforcing action with a regime of fines (a recent report by a UK parliamentary committee, examining the democratic implications of social media fueled disinformation, notes that one in six of Facebook’s moderators now works in Germany — citing that as “practical evidence that legislation can work”).

So there are very visible cracks in both its claim to be “building global community” or even that it has community standards at all, given it doesn’t pro-actively enforce them (in most markets). So why not embrace a full fragmentation of its platform — and let a thousand little blue ships set sail!

And if Facebook really wants one community principle to set as its pole star, one rule to rule them all (and to vanquish its existential jabberwocky), it should swear to put life before data.

Locally tuned, culturally sensitive Facebooks that stand up for democratic values and civic standards should also help rework the moderation challenge — removing the need for Facebook to have the equivalent of sweat shops based on outsourcing repeat human exposure to violent and toxic content.

This element is one of the ugliest sides of the social media platform business. But with empowered, smaller businesses operating in closer proximities to the communities being served, Facebook stands a better chance of getting on top of its content problems — and getting out of a reactive crisis mode, piled high with problems, where it’s currently stuck. Instead it could take up a position in the community intelligence vanguard where its workforce can root out damaging abuse before it can go viral, metastasize and wreak wider societal harms.

Proper community management could also, over time, encourage a more positive sharing environment to develop — where posting hateful stuff doesn’t get rewarded with feedback loops. Certainly not algorithmically, as it indeed has been.

As an additional measure, a portion of the financial windfall gained from selling off Facebook’s other social networks could be passed directly to independent trustees appointed to the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation for spending on projects intended to counter the corrosive effects of social media on information veracity and authenticity — such as by funding school age educational programs in critical thinking.

Indeed, UK lawmakers have already called for a social media levy for a similar purpose.

  Step 3) Open the black boxes

There would still be a Facebook board and a Facebook exec team in a head office in California sitting atop all these community-oriented Facebooks — which, while operationally liberated, would still be making use of its core technology and getting limited corporate steerage. So there would still be a need for regulators to understand what Facebook’s code is doing.

Algorithmic accountability of platform technologies is essential. Regulators need to be able to see the inputs underlying the information hierarchies that these AI engines generate, and compare those against the outputs of that shaping. Which means audits. So opening the commercial black boxes — and the data holdings — to regulatory oversight.

Discrimination is easier to get away with in darkness. But Mega-platforms have shielded their commercial IP from public scrutiny and it’s only when damaging effects have surfaced in the public consciousness that users have got a glimpse of what’s been going on.

Facebook’s defense has been to say it was naive in the face of malicious activity like Russian-backed election meddling. That’s hardly an argument for more obscurity and more darkness. If you lack awareness and perspective, ask for expert help Mark.

Lawmakers have also accused the company of willfully obstructing good faith attempts at investigating scandals such as Cambridge Analytica data misuse, Kremlin-backed election interference, or how foreign money flowed into its platform seeking to influence the UK’s Brexit referendum result, in just a few of multiple examples.

Willful obstruction to good faith, democratically minded political interrogation really isn’t a sustainable strategy. Nor an ethically defensible one.

Given the vast, society-deforming size of these platforms politicians are simply not just going to give up and go home. There will have to be standards to ensure these mega-powerful information distribution systems aren’t at risk of being gamed or being biased or otherwise misused. And those standards will have to be enforced. The enforcement must also be checked and verified. So, yes, yet more audits.

Mega-platforms have also benefited from self-sustaining feedback loops based on their vast reach and data holdings, allowing them to lock in and double down on a market dominating position by, for example, applying self-learning algorithms trained on their own user data or via A/B testing at vast, vast scale to optimize UX design to maximize engagement and monopolize attention.

User choice in this scenario is radically denuded, and competition increasingly gets pushed back and even locked out, without such easy access to equivalently massive pools of data.

If a mega-platform has optimized the phasing and positioning of — for example — a consent button by running comparative tests to determine which combination yields the fewest opt outs, is it fair or right to the user being asked to ‘choose’? Are people being treated with respect? Or, well, like lab rats?

Breaking Facebook’s platform into lots of Facebooks could also be an opportunity to rethink its data monopoly. To argue that its central business should not have an absolute right to the data pool generated by each smaller, market specific Facebook.

Part of the regulatory oversight could include a system of accountability over how Facebook’s parent business can and cannot use pooled data holdings.

If Facebook’s executive team had to make an ethics application to a relevant regulatory panel to request and justify access each time the parent business wanted to dip into the global data pool or tap data from a particular regional cluster of Facebooks, how might that change thought processes within the leadership team?

Facebook’s own (now former) CSO, Alex Stamos, identified problems baked into the current executive team’s ‘business as usual’ thinking — writing emphatically in an internal memo earlier this year: “We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people… We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about challenges and what we are doing to fix them.”

It seems very unlikely that an application to the relevant regulators asking for ‘Europe-wide data so we can A/B test user consent flows to get more Europeans to switch on facial recognition‘ would pass the ‘life before data’ community standard litmus test.

And, well, it’s well established that the fact of being watched and knowing it’s happening has the power to change behavior. After all, Facebook’s platform is a major testament to that.

So it may be more that it’s external guidance — rather than a new internal governance model — which Facebook sorely lacks. Some external watchers to watch its internal watchmen.

  Step 4) Remove Zuckerberg from (his) office

Public companies are supposed to be answerable to their shareholders. Thanks to the share structure that Mark Zuckerberg put in place at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is answerable to no one except himself. And despite Facebook’s years of scandals, he does not appear to have ever felt the urge to sack himself.

When the idea of personal accountability was brought up with him, in a recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher, he had a moment of making a light joke of it — quipping “do you really want me to fire myself right now? For the news?” before falling back on his line that: “I think we should do what’s gonna be right for the community.”

And, you know what, the joke was exactly right: The idea that Zuckerberg would terminate his own position is both laughable and ludicrous. It is a joke.

Which means Facebook’s executive structure is also a joke because there is zero accountability at the highest level — beyond Mark’s personal threshold for shame or empathy — and that’s now a global problem.

Zuckerberg has more power than most of the world’s elected politicians (and arguably some of the world’s political leaders). Yet he can’t be kicked out of his office, nor lose his CEO seat at any ballot box. He’s a Facebook fixture — short of a literal criminal conviction or otherwise reputation terminating incident.

While you could argue that not being answerable to the mercenary whims of shareholder pressure is a good thing because it frees Zuckerberg to raise business transformation needs above returns-focused investor considerations (albeit, let’s see how his nerve holds after that $120BN investor punch) — his near 15-year record in the CEO’s chair counters any suggestion that he’s a person who makes radical and sweeping changes to Facebook’s modus operandi.

On the contrary, he’s shown himself a master of saying ‘oops we did it again!’ and then getting right back to ‘screwing things up’ as usual. That’s either rank incompetence or intention.

He’s also demonstrated a consistent disbelief that Facebook’s platform creates problems — preferring to couch connecting people as a glorious humanitarian mission from whence life-affirming marriages and children flow. Rather than seeing risks in putting global megaphones in the hands of anyone with an urge to shout.

As recently as November 2016 he was still dismissing the idea that political disinformation spread via Facebook had been in any way impactful on the US presidential election — as a “pretty crazy idea” — yet his own business had staffed divisions dedicated to working with US politicians to get their campaign messages out. It shouldn’t be rocket science to see a contradiction there. But until very recently Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t.

The fact of him also being the original founder of the business does not help in the push for disruptive change to Facebook itself. The best person to fix a radically broken product is unlikely to be the person whose entire adult life has been conjoined to a late night college dorm room idea spat online — and which, through him sticking and sticking with it, ended up spinning up and out into a fortune. And then into a major, major global mess.

The ‘no better person than me to fix it’ line can also be countered by pointing to Zuckerberg’s personal history of playing fast and loose with other people’s data (from the “dumb fucks” comment all the way back in his student days to years of deliberate platform choices at Facebook that made people’s information public by default); and by suggesting entrenched challenges would surely benefit from fresh eyes, new thinking and a broader perspective.

Add to that, Zuckerberg has arguably boxed himself in, politically speaking, thanks to a series of disingenuous, misleading and abstruse claims and statements made to lawmakers — limiting his room for manoeuvre or for rethinking his approach; let alone being able to genuinely compromise or make honest platform changes.

His opportunity to be radically honest about Facebook’s problems probably passed years and years back — when he was busy working hard on his personal challenge to wear a tie everyday [2009]. Or only eat animals he kills himself [2011].

By 2013’s personal challenge, it’s possible that Zuckerberg had sensed something new in the data stream that might be coming down the pipes towards him — as he set himself the challenge of expanding his personal horizons (not that he put it that way) by “meeting a new person every day who does not work at Facebook”.

Meeting a new person every day who did work at Facebook would have been far too easy, see.

Is it even possible to think outside the box when your entire adult life has been spent tooling away inside the same one?

  Step 5) Over to you… 

What are your radical solutions for fixing Facebook? Should Zuckerberg stay or should he go? What do you want lawmakers to do about social media? What kinds of policy interventions might set these mega-platforms on a less fractious path? Or do you believe all this trouble on social media is a storm in a teacup that will blow over if we but screw our courage to the sticking place and wait for everyone to catch up with the cardinal Internet truth that nothing online is what it seems…

Ideas in the comments pls…

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2AM9D17 Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[latestnews2018-blog]

Is it time to remove Zuckerberg from (his) office?

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/is-it-time-to-remove-zuckerberg-from-his-office/

Is it time to remove Zuckerberg from (his) office?

A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity at a worldwide scale.

Challenge accepted.

Here’s the thought experiment: Fixing Facebook 

We’ll start with Facebook because, while it’s by no means the only tech company whose platform contains a bottomless cesspit of problems, it is the most used social platform in the West; the de facto global monopoly outside China.

And, well, even Zuckerberg’ thinks it needs fixing. Or at least that its PR needs fixing — given he made “Fixing Facebook” his ‘personal challenge’ of the year this year — proof, if any more were needed, of his incredible capacity for sounding tone-deaf.

For a little more context on these annual personal challenges, Zuckerberg once previously set himself the challenge of reading a new book every two weeks. So it seems fair to ask: Is Facebook a 26-book sized fix?

If we’re talking in book metaphor terms, the challenge of fixing Facebook seems at least on the scale of the Library of Alexandria, say, given the volume of human content being daily fenced. It may, more likely, be multiple libraries of Alexandria. Just as, if Facebook content was housed in a physical library, the company would require considerably more real estate that the largest library of the ancient world to house its staggeringly-massive-and-expanding-by-the-second human content collection — which also of course forms the foundation of its business.

Zuckerberg himself has implied that his 2018 challenge — to fix the company he founded years before the iPhone arrived to supercharge the smartphone revolution and, down that line, mobilize Facebook’s societal ‘revolution’ — is his toughest yet, and likely to take at least two or three years before it bears fruit, not just the one. So Facebook’s founder is already managing our expectations and he’s barely even started.

In all likelihood, if Facebook were left alone to keep standing ethically aloof, shaping and distributing information at vast scale while simultaneously denying that’s editing — to enjoy another decade of unforgivably bad judgement calls (so, basically, to ‘self-regulate’; or, as the New York Times put it, for Zuckerberg to be educated at societal expense) — then his 2018 personal challenge would become just ‘Chapter One, Volume One’ in a neverending life’s ‘work-in-progress’.

Great for Mark, far less great for humans and democratic societies all over the world.

Frankly, there has to be a better way. So here’s an alternative plan for fixing Facebook — or at least a few big ideas to get policymakers’ juices flowing… Bear in mind this is a thought exercise so we make no suggestions for how to enact the plan — we’re just throwing ideas out there to get folks thinking.

  Step 1: Goodbye network of networks

Facebook has been allowed to acquire several other social communication networks — most notably photo-focused social network Instagram [1BN monthly active users] and messaging app platform WhatsApp [1.5BN] — so Zuckerberg has not just ONE massively popular social network (Facebook: [2.2BN]) but a saccharine suite of eyeball-harvesting machines.

Last month he revealed his sunless empire casts its shadow across a full 2.5BN individuals if you factor in all his apps — albeit, that was an attempt to distract investors from the stock price car crash conference call that was to follow. But the staggering size of the empire is undeniable.

So the first part of fixing Facebook is really simple: No dominant social network should be allowed to possess (or continue to possess) multiple dominant social networks.

There’s literally no good argument for why this is good for anyone other than (in Facebook’s case) Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg’s shareholders. Which is zero reason not to do something that’s net good for the rest of humanity. On one level it’s just basic math.

Setting aside (for just a second) the tangible damages inflicted upon humans by unregulated social media platforms with zero editorial values and a threadbare minimum of morality which wafts like gauze in the slipstream of supercharged and continuously re-engineered growth and engagement engines that DO NOT FACTOR HUMAN COST into their algorithmic calculations — allowing their masters to preside over suprasocietal revenue stripping mega-platforms — which, to be clear, is our primary concern here — the damage to competition and innovation alone from Zuckerberg owning multiple social networks is both visible and quantifiable.

Just ask Snapchat. Because, well, you can’t ask the social networks that don’t exist because Zuckerberg commands a full flush of attention-harvesting networks. So take a good, long, hard look at all those Stories clones he’s copypasted right across his social network of social networks. Not very innovative is it?

And even if you don’t think mega-platforms cause harm by eroding civic and democratic values (against, well, plenty of evidence to the contrary), if you value creativity, competition and consumer choice it’s equally a no brainer to tend your markets in a way that allows multiple distinct networks to thrive, rather than let one megacorp get so powerful it’s essentially metastasized into a Borg-like entity capable of enslaving and/or destroying any challenger, idea or even value in its path. (And doing all that at the same time as monopolizing its users’ attention.)

We see this too in how Facebook applies its technology in a way that seeks to reshape laws in its business model’s favor. Because while individuals break laws, massively powerful megacorps merely lean their bulk to squash them into a more pleasing shape.

Facebook is not just spending big on lobbying lawmakers (and it sure is doing that), it’s using technology and the brute force of its platform to pound on and roll over the rule of law by deforming foundational tenets of society. Privacy being just one of them.

And it’s not doing this reshaping for the good of humanity. Oh no. While democratic societies have rules to protect the vulnerable and foster competition and choice because they are based on recognizing value in human life, Facebook’s motives are 100% self-interested and profit-driven.

The company wants to rewrite rules globally to further expand its bottom line. Hence its mission to pool all humans into a single monetizable bucket — no matter if people don’t exactly mesh together because people aren’t actually bits of data. If you want to be that reductive make soup, not a “global community”.

So step one to fixing Facebook is simple: Break up Zuckerberg’s empire.

In practical terms that means forcing Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp — at a bare minimum. A single network is necessarily less potent than a network of networks. And it becomes, at least theoretically possible for Facebook to be at risk from competitive forces.

You would also need to at keep a weather eye on social VR, in case Oculus needs to be taken out of Zuckerberg’s hands too. There’s less of an immediate imperative there, certainly. This VR cycle is still as dead as the tone of voice the Facebook founder used to describe the things his avatar was virtually taking in when he indulged in a bit of Puerto Rico disaster tourism for an Oculus product demo last year.

That said, there’s still a strong argument to say that Facebook, the dominant force of the social web and then the social mobile web, should not be allowed to shape and dictate even a nascent potential future disruptor in the same social technology sphere.

Not if you value diversity and creativity — and, well, a lot more besides.

But all these enforced sells-offs would just raise lots more money for Facebook! I hear you cry. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — so long as it gets, shall we say, well spent. The windfall could be used to fund a massive recruitment drive to properly resource Facebook’s business in every market where it operates.

And I do mean MASSIVE. Not the ‘10,000 extra security and moderation staff’ Facebook has said will hire by the end of this year (raising the headcount it has working on these critical tasks to around 20k in total).

To be anywhere near capable of properly contextualizing content across a platform that’s actively used by 2BN+ humans — and therefore to be able to rapidly and effectively spot and quash malicious manipulation, hateful conduct and so on, and thus responsibly manage and sustain a genuine global ‘community’ — the company would likely need to add hundreds of thousands of content reviewers/moderators. Which would be very expensive indeed.

Yet Facebook paid a cool $19BN for WhatsApp back in 2014 — so an enforced sell off of its other networks should raise a truck tonne of cash to held fund a vastly larger ‘trust and safety’ personnel bill. (While AI systems and technologies can help with the moderation challenge, Zuckerberg himself has admitted that AI alone won’t scale to the content challenge for “many years” to come — if indeed it can scale at all.)

Unfortunately there’s another problem though. The human labor involved in carrying out content moderation across Facebook’s 2BN+ user mega-platform is ethically horrifying because the people who Facebook contracts for ‘after the fact’ moderation necessarily live neck deep in its cesspit. Their sweating toil is to keep paddling the shit so Facebook’s sewers don’t back up entirely and flood the platform with it.

So, in a truly ideal ‘fixed Facebook’ scenario, there wouldn’t be a need for this kind of dehumanizing, industrialized content review system — which necessitates that eyes be averted and empathy disengaged from any considerations of a traumatized ‘clean up’ workforce.

Much like Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Zuckerberg’s mega-platform requires an unfortunate underclass of worker doing its dirty work. And just as the existence of slaves in Utopia made it evident that the ‘utopian vision’ being presented was not really all it seemed, Facebook’s outsourced teams of cheap labor — whose day job is to sit and watch videos of human beheadings, torture, violence etc; or make a microsecond stress-judgement on whether a piece of hate speech is truly hateful enough to be rendered incapable of monetization and pulled from the platform — the awful cost on both sides of that human experience undermines Zuckerberg’s claim that he’s “building global community”.

Moore coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek — and its two components suggest an intended translation of ‘no place’. Or perhaps, better yet, it was supposed to be a pun — as Margaret Atwood has suggested — meaning something along the lines of ‘the good place that simply doesn’t exist’. Which might be a good description for Zuckerberg’s “global community”.

So we’ll come back to that.

Because the next step in the plan should help cut the Facebook moderation challenge down to a more manageable size…

  Step 2) Break up Facebook into lots of market specific Facebooks

Instead of there being just one Facebook (comprised of two core legal entities: Facebook USA and Facebook International, in Ireland), it’s time to break up Facebook’s business into hundreds of market specific Facebooks that can really start to serve their local communities. You could go further still and subdivide at a state, county or community level.

A global social network is an oxymoron. Humans are individuals and humanity is made up of all sorts of peoples, communities and groupings. So to suggest the whole of humanity needs to co-exist on the exact same platform, under the exact same overarching set of ‘community standards’, is — truly — the stuff of megalomaniacs.

To add insult to societal and cultural injury, Facebook — the company that claims it’s doing this (while ignoring the ‘awkward’ fact that what it’s building isn’t functioning equally everywhere, even in its own backyard) — has an executive team that’s almost exclusively white and male, and steeped in a very particular Valley ‘Kool Aid’ techno-utopian mindset that’s wrapped in the U.S. flag and bound to the U.S. constitution.

Which is another way of saying that’s the polar opposite of thinking global.

Facebook released its fifth annual diversity report this year which revealed it making little progress in increasing diversity over the past five years. In senior leadership roles, Facebook’s 2018 skew is 70:30 male female, and a full 69.7% white. While the company was fully 77% male and 74% white in 2014.

Facebook’s ongoing lack of diversity is not representative of the U.S. population, let alone reflective of the myriad regions its product reaches around the planet. So the idea that an executive team with such an inexorably narrow, U.S.-focused perspective could meaningfully — let alone helpfully — serve the whole of humanity is a nonsense. And the fact that Zuckerberg is still talking in those terms merely spotlights an abject lack of corporate diversity and global perspective at his company.

If he genuinely believes his own “global community” rhetoric he’s failing even harder than he looks. Most probably, though, it’s just a convenient marketing label to wallpaper the growth strategy that’s delivered for Facebook’s shareholders for years — by the company pushing into and dominating international markets.

Yet, and here’s the rub, without making commensurate investments in resourcing its business in international markets….

Fascinating detail from @karaswisher interview w/ Zuck where he admits Fb’s margin comes from rest of world – i.e. where fb is under-resourced vs impacts/damage its platforms can have – and not from the US. So, tl;dr, fb’s profitability is reliant on fb’s lack of responsibility pic.twitter.com/UNG7OFssjF

— Natasha (@riptari) July 19, 2018

This facet of Facebook’s business becomes especially problematic when you consider how the company has been pouring money into subsidizing (or seeking to) Internet access in emerging markets. So it is spending lots and lots of money, just not on keeping people safe.

Initially, Facebook spent money to expand the reach of its platform via its Internet.org ‘Free Basics’ initiative which was marketed as a ‘humanitarian’, quasi-philanthropic mission to ‘wire the world’ — though plenty of outsiders and some target countries viewed it not as charity but as a self-serving and competitive-crushing business development tactic. (Including India — which blocked Free Basics, but not before Facebook had spent millions on ads trying to get locals to lobby the regulator on its behalf).

More recently it’s been putting money into telecom infrastructure a bit less loudly — presumably hoping a less immediately self-serving approach to investing in infrastructure in target growth markets will avoid another highly politicized controversy.

It’s more wallpapering though: Connectivity investments are a business growth strategy predicated on Facebook removing connectivity barriers that stand in the way of Facebook onboarding more eyeballs.

And given the amounts of money Facebooks has been willing to spend to try to lodge its product in the hands of more new Internet users — to the point where, in some markets, Facebook effectively is the Internet — it’s even less forgivable that the company has failed to properly resource its international operations and stop its products from having some truly tragic consequences.

The cost to humanity for Facebook failing to operate with due care is painfully visible and horribly difficult to quantify.

Not that Zuckerberg has let those inconvenient truths stop him from continuing to suggest he’s the man to build a community for the planet. But again that rather implies Facebook’s problems grow out of Facebook’s lack of external perspective.

Aside from the fact that we are all equally human, there is no one homogenous human community that spans the entire world. So when Zuckerberg talks about Facebook’s ‘global community’ he is, in effect, saying nothing — or saying something almost entirely meaningless as to render down to a platitudinous sludge. (At least unless his desire is indeed a Borg-esque absorption of other cultures — into a ‘resistance is futile’ homogenous ‘Californormification’ of the planet. And we must surely hope it’s not. Although Facebook’s Free Basics have been accused of amounting to digital colonialism.)

Zuckerberg does seem to have quasi-realized the contradiction lurking at the the tin heart of his ‘global’ endeavor, though. Which is why he’s talked suggestively about creating a ‘Supreme Court of Facebook‘ — i.e. to try to reboot the pitifully unfit for purpose governance structure.

But talk of ‘community-oriented governance’ has neither been firmed up nor formalized into a tangible structural reform plan.

While the notion of a Supreme Court of Facebook, especially, does risk sounding worryingly like Zuckerberg fancies his own personal Star Chamber, the fact he’s even saying this sort of stuff shows he knows Facebook has planet-straddling problems that are far, far too big for its minimalist Libertarian ‘guardrails’ to manage or control. And in turn that suggests the event horizon of scaling Facebook’s business model has been reached.

Aka: Hello $120BN market cap blackhole.

“It’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world,” Zuckerberg said earlier THIS YEAR — 2018! — in what must surely count as the one of the tardiest enlightenments of a well educated public person in the Western world, period.

“I’ve been working on and thinking through,” he continued his mental perambulation. “How can you set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world?”

Well, Mark, here’s an idea to factor into your thinking: Facebook’s problem is Facebook’s massive size.

So why not chop the platform up into market specific operations that are free to make some of their own decisions and let them develop diverse corporate cultures of their own. Most importantly empower them to be operationally sensitive to the needs of local communities — and so well placed to responsively serve them.

Imagine the Facebook brand as a sort of loose ‘franchise’, with each little Facebook at liberty to intelligently adapt the menu to local tastes. And each of these ‘content eateries’ taking pride in the interior of its real estate, with dedicated managers who make their presence felt and whose jobs are to ensure great facilities but no violent food fights.

There would also need to be some core principles too, of course. A set of democratic and civic values that all the little Facebooks are bound to protect — to push back against attempts by states or concerted external forces seeking to maliciously hijack and derail speech.

But switch around the current reality — a hulkingly massive platform attached to a relatively tiny (in resources terms) business operation — and the slavering jabberwocky that Zuckerberg is now on a personal mission to slay might well cease to exist, as multiple messy human challenges get cut down to a more manageable size. Not every single content judgement call on Facebook needs to scale planet-wide.

Multiple, well resourced market-specific Facebooks staffed locally so they can pro-actively spot problems and manage their communities would not be the same business at all. Facebook would become an even more biodiverse ecosystem — of linked but tonally distinct communities — which could even, in time, diverge a bit on the feature front, via adding non-core extras, based on market specific appetites and tastes.

There would obviously have to be basic core social function interoperability — so that individual users of different Facebooks could still connect and communicate. But beyond a bit of interplay (a sort of ‘Facebook Basics’) why should there be a requirement that everyone’s Facebook experience be exactly the same?

While Facebook talks as if it has a single set of community standards, the reality is fuzzier. For example it applies stricter hate speech rules to content moderation in a market like Germany, which passed a social media hate speech law last year. Those sorts of exceptions aren’t going to go away either; as more lawmakers wake up to the challenges posed by the platform it’s clear more demands will be placed on Facebook to regulate the content on the platform.

So, Zuckerberg, why not step actively into a process of embracing greater localization — in a way that’s sensitive to cultural and societal norms — and use the accrued political capital from that to invest in defending the platform’s core principles?

This approach won’t work in every market, clearly. But allowing for a greater tonality of content — a more risqué French Facebook, say, vs the ‘no-nipples please’ U.S. flavor — coupled with greater sensitivity to market mood and feedback could position Facebook to work with democracies and strengthen civic and cultural values, instead of trying to barge its way along by unilaterally imposing the U.S. constitution on the rest of the planet.

Facebook as it is now, globally scaled but under-resourced, is not in a position to enforce its own community standards. It only does so when or if it receives repeat complaints (and even then it won’t always act on them).

Or when a market has passed legislation enforcing action with a regime of fines (a recent report by a UK parliamentary committee, examining the democratic implications of social media fueled disinformation, notes that one in six of Facebook’s moderators now works in Germany — citing that as “practical evidence that legislation can work”).

So there are very visible cracks in both its claim to be “building global community” or even that it has community standards at all, given it doesn’t pro-actively enforce them (in most markets). So why not embrace a full fragmentation of its platform — and let a thousand little blue ships set sail!

And if Facebook really wants one community principle to set as its pole star, one rule to rule them all (and to vanquish its existential jabberwocky), it should swear to put life before data.

Locally tuned, culturally sensitive Facebooks that stand up for democratic values and civic standards should also help rework the moderation challenge — removing the need for Facebook to have the equivalent of sweat shops based on outsourcing repeat human exposure to violent and toxic content.

This element is one of the ugliest sides of the social media platform business. But with empowered, smaller businesses operating in closer proximities to the communities being served, Facebook stands a better chance of getting on top of its content problems — and getting out of a reactive crisis mode, piled high with problems, where it’s currently stuck. Instead it could take up a position in the community intelligence vanguard where its workforce can root out damaging abuse before it can go viral, metastasize and wreak wider societal harms.

Proper community management could also, over time, encourage a more positive sharing environment to develop — where posting hateful stuff doesn’t get rewarded with feedback loops. Certainly not algorithmically, as it indeed has been.

As an additional measure, a portion of the financial windfall gained from selling off Facebook’s other social networks could be passed directly to independent trustees appointed to the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation for spending on projects intended to counter the corrosive effects of social media on information veracity and authenticity — such as by funding school age educational programs in critical thinking.

Indeed, UK lawmakers have already called for a social media levy for a similar purpose.

  Step 3) Open the black boxes

There would still be a Facebook board and a Facebook exec team in a head office in California sitting atop all these community-oriented Facebooks — which, while operationally liberated, would still be making use of its core technology and getting limited corporate steerage. So there would still be a need for regulators to understand what Facebook’s code is doing.

Algorithmic accountability of platform technologies is essential. Regulators need to be able to see the inputs underlying the information hierarchies that these AI engines generate, and compare those against the outputs of that shaping. Which means audits. So opening the commercial black boxes — and the data holdings — to regulatory oversight.

Discrimination is easier to get away with in darkness. But Mega-platforms have shielded their commercial IP from public scrutiny and it’s only when damaging effects have surfaced in the public consciousness that users have got a glimpse of what’s been going on.

Facebook’s defense has been to say it was naive in the face of malicious activity like Russian-backed election meddling. That’s hardly an argument for more obscurity and more darkness. If you lack awareness and perspective, ask for expert help Mark.

Lawmakers have also accused the company of willfully obstructing good faith attempts at investigating scandals such as Cambridge Analytica data misuse, Kremlin-backed election interference, or how foreign money flowed into its platform seeking to influence the UK’s Brexit referendum result, in just a few of multiple examples.

Willful obstruction to good faith, democratically minded political interrogation really isn’t a sustainable strategy. Nor an ethically defensible one.

Given the vast, society-deforming size of these platforms politicians are simply not just going to give up and go home. There will have to be standards to ensure these mega-powerful information distribution systems aren’t at risk of being gamed or being biased or otherwise misused. And those standards will have to be enforced. The enforcement must also be checked and verified. So, yes, yet more audits.

Mega-platforms have also benefited from self-sustaining feedback loops based on their vast reach and data holdings, allowing them to lock in and double down on a market dominating position by, for example, applying self-learning algorithms trained on their own user data or via A/B testing at vast, vast scale to optimize UX design to maximize engagement and monopolize attention.

User choice in this scenario is radically denuded, and competition increasingly gets pushed back and even locked out, without such easy access to equivalently massive pools of data.

If a mega-platform has optimized the phasing and positioning of — for example — a consent button by running comparative tests to determine which combination yields the fewest opt outs, is it fair or right to the user being asked to ‘choose’? Are people being treated with respect? Or, well, like lab rats?

Breaking Facebook’s platform into lots of Facebooks could also be an opportunity to rethink its data monopoly. To argue that its central business should not have an absolute right to the data pool generated by each smaller, market specific Facebook.

Part of the regulatory oversight could include a system of accountability over how Facebook’s parent business can and cannot use pooled data holdings.

If Facebook’s executive team had to make an ethics application to a relevant regulatory panel to request and justify access each time the parent business wanted to dip into the global data pool or tap data from a particular regional cluster of Facebooks, how might that change thought processes within the leadership team?

Facebook’s own (now former) CSO, Alex Stamos, identified problems baked into the current executive team’s ‘business as usual’ thinking — writing emphatically in an internal memo earlier this year: “We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people… We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about challenges and what we are doing to fix them.”

It seems very unlikely that an application to the relevant regulators asking for ‘Europe-wide data so we can A/B test user consent flows to get more Europeans to switch on facial recognition‘ would pass the ‘life before data’ community standard litmus test.

And, well, it’s well established that the fact of being watched and knowing it’s happening has the power to change behavior. After all, Facebook’s platform is a major testament to that.

So it may be more that it’s external guidance — rather than a new internal governance model — which Facebook sorely lacks. Some external watchers to watch its internal watchmen.

  Step 4) Remove Zuckerberg from (his) office

Public companies are supposed to be answerable to their shareholders. Thanks to the share structure that Mark Zuckerberg put in place at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is answerable to no one except himself. And despite Facebook’s years of scandals, he does not appear to have ever felt the urge to sack himself.

When the idea of personal accountability was brought up with him, in a recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher, he had a moment of making a light joke of it — quipping “do you really want me to fire myself right now? For the news?” before falling back on his line that: “I think we should do what’s gonna be right for the community.”

And, you know what, the joke was exactly right: The idea that Zuckerberg would terminate his own position is both laughable and ludicrous. It is a joke.

Which means Facebook’s executive structure is also a joke because there is zero accountability at the highest level — beyond Mark’s personal threshold for shame or empathy — and that’s now a global problem.

Zuckerberg has more power than most of the world’s elected politicians (and arguably some of the world’s political leaders). Yet he can’t be kicked out of his office, nor lose his CEO seat at any ballot box. He’s a Facebook fixture — short of a literal criminal conviction or otherwise reputation terminating incident.

While you could argue that not being answerable to the mercenary whims of shareholder pressure is a good thing because it frees Zuckerberg to raise business transformation needs above returns-focused investor considerations (albeit, let’s see how his nerve holds after that $120BN investor punch) — his near 15-year record in the CEO’s chair counters any suggestion that he’s a person who makes radical and sweeping changes to Facebook’s modus operandi.

On the contrary, he’s shown himself a master of saying ‘oops we did it again!’ and then getting right back to ‘screwing things up’ as usual. That’s either rank incompetence or intention.

He’s also demonstrated a consistent disbelief that Facebook’s platform creates problems — preferring to couch connecting people as a glorious humanitarian mission from whence life-affirming marriages and children flow. Rather than seeing risks in putting global megaphones in the hands of anyone with an urge to shout.

As recently as November 2016 he was still dismissing the idea that political disinformation spread via Facebook had been in any way impactful on the US presidential election — as a “pretty crazy idea” — yet his own business had staffed divisions dedicated to working with US politicians to get their campaign messages out. It shouldn’t be rocket science to see a contradiction there. But until very recently Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t.

The fact of him also being the original founder of the business does not help in the push for disruptive change to Facebook itself. The best person to fix a radically broken product is unlikely to be the person whose entire adult life has been conjoined to a late night college dorm room idea spat online — and which, through him sticking and sticking with it, ended up spinning up and out into a fortune. And then into a major, major global mess.

The ‘no better person than me to fix it’ line can also be countered by pointing to Zuckerberg’s personal history of playing fast and loose with other people’s data (from the “dumb fucks” comment all the way back in his student days to years of deliberate platform choices at Facebook that made people’s information public by default); and by suggesting entrenched challenges would surely benefit from fresh eyes, new thinking and a broader perspective.

Add to that, Zuckerberg has arguably boxed himself in, politically speaking, thanks to a series of disingenuous, misleading and abstruse claims and statements made to lawmakers — limiting his room for manoeuvre or for rethinking his approach; let alone being able to genuinely compromise or make honest platform changes.

His opportunity to be radically honest about Facebook’s problems probably passed years and years back — when he was busy working hard on his personal challenge to wear a tie everyday [2009]. Or only eat animals he kills himself [2011].

By 2013’s personal challenge, it’s possible that Zuckerberg had sensed something new in the data stream that might be coming down the pipes towards him — as he set himself the challenge of expanding his personal horizons (not that he put it that way) by “meeting a new person every day who does not work at Facebook”.

Meeting a new person every day who did work at Facebook would have been far too easy, see.

Is it even possible to think outside the box when your entire adult life has been spent tooling away inside the same one?

  Step 5) Over to you… 

What are your radical solutions for fixing Facebook? Should Zuckerberg stay or should he go? What do you want lawmakers to do about social media? What kinds of policy interventions might set these mega-platforms on a less fractious path? Or do you believe all this trouble on social media is a storm in a teacup that will blow over if we but screw our courage to the sticking place and wait for everyone to catch up with the cardinal Internet truth that nothing online is what it seems…

Ideas in the comments pls…

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