Facebook wants to do good but ends up giving Americans a bad name

The Ugly American, the title of a novel published in 1958 by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, entered the language to refer to boorish American officials abroad who sought to improve the lives of natives without taking the trouble to learn their language, culture, or needs.

A long line of ugly Americans, mostly politicians and government officials from both parties, have believed that applying simple formulas based on idealised versions of US institutions -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- could convert countries like Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style consumer utopias. Inevitably, these Americans caused more harm than good.

Today, the notion is not applied to a government official but a private citizen, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Zuckerberg seemingly has received an endless stream of criticism because of Facebook's lamentable impact on American politics and culture.

Less attention has been given to Facebook's impact on foreign markets, which Mr Zuckerberg penetrated with no evident concern about the possible consequences of conducting massive social experiments in countries with weak institutions and histories of instability.

Back in 2015, Mr Zuckerberg teamed up with the musician Bono to advocate a human right to internet access. The duo wrote for the New York Times:

In Ethiopia and Tanzania, for example, farmers connect to get better prices, track inventory and make mobile insurance payments in case of bad weather. In Nigeria, citizens use BudgIT, a mobile app, to assess whether governments keep their spending promises…. In Guatemala, cellphones inform mothers how to have healthy pregnancies. In Kenya, women receive financial services via their cellphones.

Reality has turned out a bit different. In Ethiopia, Facebook posts "incite[d] mob violence, ethnic clashes, crackdowns on independent press or outspoken voices". In Nigeria, Facebook users circulated grisly images of dead bodies, which were falsely presented to suggest that members of one ethnic group massacred members of a rival ethnic group, and sparked a wave of horrific killings. In a country with 24 million Facebook users, only four people were employed to fact-check Facebook posts.

In Myanmar, Facebook accounts were used to stir up ethnic violence against the Rohingya, tens of thousands of whom have been killed and many more driven into exile. Similar accounts of Facebook being used to inflame conflict and provoke massacres have been given for Sri Lanka, Yemen, Iraq, and Bangladesh. And in many other countries, from Vietnam to Poland, governments or their supporters have used Facebook to target, harass, and endanger dissidents, political opponents, and vulnerable minorities.

In the Times piece, Mr Zuckerberg was touting internet access, not Facebook itself. But by now we know that internet access and Facebook are intertwined, both in Mr Zuckerberg's plan and in reality. In many countries, Facebook and its properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, are the dominant social media platforms, as they are in the United States.

Both the internet and Facebook have done very well since that article was published. From 2015 to today, the percentage of the global population with internet access increased from 41% to 66%, while Facebook's monthly active user base increased from 1.49 to 2.89 billion. While the extent of Facebook's contribution to the erosion of democracy and human rights over this period is unknown, the platform has clearly played a role in some of the worst atrocities around the globe, and in the coarsening of political life virtually everywhere.

But while Mr Zuckerberg's goal of "building a global community resembles American foreign policy, Facebook is of course a private entity. It is subject to American jurisdiction, not the other way around. The US foreign policy establishment, along with Congress and the president, might consider whether America owes it to the world to rein in Facebook in countries that lack the institutional capacity to do it themselves.

A few reforms suggest themselves. The US Congress could pass a law that requires American social media companies to devote resources to monitor and fact-check content abroad in proportion to the amount they spend on these activities in the US.

The title of Burdick and Lederer's novel actually referred ironically to one of the few good Americans in the story. The negative meaning stuck because the shorthand was more useful: the bad type of American greatly outnumbered the good. And now, thanks in part to Facebook's foreign policy, the ugly American is everywhere. 

https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2213455/facebooks-ugly-american-problem-abroad

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before the Senate

Haugen wants Facebook to change its algorithm and cooperate with researchers

After revealing her identity on Sunday night, Frances Haugen — the whistleblower who leaked controversial Facebook documents to The Wall Street Journal — testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Tuesday.

Haugen’s testimony came after a hearing last week, when Facebook global head of Safety Antigone Davis was questioned about the company’s negative impact on children and teens. Davis stuck to Facebook’s script, frustrating senators as she failed to answer questions directly. But Haugen, a former project manager on civic misinformation at Facebook, was predictably more forthcoming with information.

Haugen is an algorithm specialist, having served as a project manager at companies like Google, Pinterest and Yelp. While she was at Facebook, she addressed issues related to democracy, misinformation and counter-espionage.

“Having worked on four different types of social networks, I understand how complex and nuanced these problems are,” Haugen said in her opening statement. “However, the choices being made inside Facebook are disastrous — for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy and for our democracy — and that is why we must demand Facebook make changes.”

The algorithm

Throughout the hearing, Haugen made clear that she thinks that Facebook’s current algorithm, which rewards posts that generate meaningful social interactions (MSIs), is dangerous. Rolled out in 2018, this news feed algorithm prioritizes interactions (such as comments and likes) from the people who Facebook thinks you’re closest to, like friends and family.

But as the documents leaked by Haugen show, data scientists raised concerns that this system yielded “unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news.”

Facebook also uses engagement-based ranking, in which an AI displays the content that it thinks will be most interesting to individual users. This means content that elicits stronger reactions from users will be prioritized, boosting misinformation, toxicity and violent content. Haugen said she thinks that chronological ranking would help mitigate these negative impacts.

“I’ve spent most of my career working on systems like engagement-based ranking. When I come to you and say these things, I’m basically damning 10 years of my own work,” Haugen said in the hearing.

As Haugen told “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, she was part of a civic integrity committee that Facebook dissolved after the 2020 election. Facebook implemented safeguards to reduce misinformation ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. After the election, it turned off those safeguards. But after the attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Facebook switched them back on again.

“Facebook changed those safety defaults in the run up to the election because they knew they were dangerous. Because they wanted that growth back after the election, they returned to their original defaults,” Haugen said. “I think that’s deeply problematic.”

Haugen said that Facebook is emphasizing a false choice — that they can either use their volatile algorithms and continue their rapid growth, or they can prioritize user safety and decline. But she thinks that adopting more safety measures, like oversight from academics, researchers and government agencies, could actually help Facebook’s bottom line.

“The thing I’m asking for is a move [away] from short-term-ism, which is what Facebook is run under today. It’s being led by metrics and not people,” Haugen said. “With appropriate oversight and some of these constraints, it’s possible that Facebook could actually be a much more profitable company five or 10 years down the road, because it wasn’t as toxic, and not as many people quit it.”

Establishing government oversight

When asked as a “thought experiment” what she would do if she were in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes, Haugen said she would establish policies about sharing information with oversight bodies including Congress; she would work with academics to make sure they have the information they need to conduct research about the platform; and that she would immediately implement the “soft interventions” that were identified to protect the integrity of the 2020 election. She suggested requiring users to click on a link before they share it, since other companies like Twitter have found these interventions to reduce misinformation.

Haugen also added that she thinks Facebook as it’s currently structured can’t prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation, since the company is overly reliant on AI systems that Facebook itself says will likely never catch more than 10% to 20% of content.

Later on, Haugen told the committee that she “strongly encourages” reforming Section 230, a part of the United States Communications Decency Act that absolves social media platforms from being held liable for what their users post. Haugen thinks Section 230 should exempt decisions about algorithms, making it possible for companies to face legal consequences if their algorithms are found to cause harm.

“User-generated content is something companies have less control over. But they have 100% control over their algorithms,” Haugen said. “Facebook should not get a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth, virality and reactiveness over public safety.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) asked how Facebook’s bottom line would be impacted if the algorithm promoted safety. Haugen said that it would have an impact, because when users see more engaging content (even if it’s more enraging than engaging), they spend more time on the platform, yielding more ad dollars for Facebook. But she thinks the platform would still be profitable if it followed the steps she outlined for improving user safety.

International security

As reported in one of The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files stories, Facebook employees flagged instances of the platform being used for violent crime overseas, but the company’s response was inadequate, according to the documents Haugen leaked.

Employees raised concerns, for example, about armed groups in Ethiopia using the platform to coordinate violent attacks against ethnic minorities. Since Facebook’s moderation practices are so dependent on artificial intelligence, that means that its AI needs to be able to function in every language and dialect that its 2.9 billion monthly active users speak. According to the WSJ, Facebook’s AI systems don’t cover the majority of the languages spoken on the site. Haugen said that though only 9% of Facebook users speak English, 87% of the platform’s misinformation spending is devoted to English speakers.

“It seems that Facebook invests more in users who make the most money, even though the danger may not be evenly distributed based on profitability,” Haugen said. She added that she thinks Facebook’s consistent understaffing of the counter-espionage, information operations and counterterrorism teams is a national security threat, which she’s communicating with other parts of Congress about.

The future of Facebook

The members of the Senate committee indicated that they’re motivated to take action against Facebook, which is also in the midst of an antitrust lawsuit.

“I’m actually against the breaking up of Facebook,” Haugen said. “If you split Facebook and Instagram apart, it’s likely that most advertising dollars will go to Instagram, and Facebook will continue to be this ‘Frankenstein’ that is endangering lives around the world, only now there won’t be money to fund it.”

But critics argue that yesterday’s six-hour Facebook outage — unrelated to today’s hearing — showed the downside of one company having so much control, especially when platforms like WhatsApp are so integral to communication abroad.

In the meantime, lawmakers are drawing up legislation to promote safety on social media platforms for minors. Last week, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he would reintroduce legislation with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the KIDS (Kids Internet Design and Safety) Act, which seeks to create new protections for online users under 16. Today, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) brought up a bipartisan bill he introduced with three other committee members in 2019 called the Filter Bubble Transparency Act. This legislation would increase transparency by giving users the option to view content that’s not curated by a secret algorithm.

Sen. Blumenthal even suggested that Haugen come back for another hearing about her concerns that Facebook is a threat to national security. Though Facebook higher-ups spoke against Haugen during the hearing, policymakers seemed moved by her testimony.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/05/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testifies-before-the-senate/

LOL I slept through the outage, and only learned about it upon waking up.

Zuckerberg Loses $6 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by more than $6 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline.

A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting 4.9% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $121.6 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s down from almost $140 billion in a matter of weeks, according to the index.

On Sept. 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public. The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.

In response, Facebook has emphasized that the issues facing its products, including political polarization, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-loses-7-billion-hours-180950725.html

Heng ah I only use WeChat to communicate with my beloved ATBs.