can’t believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.
Ads? I can see no ads…
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
The kind of person whose past probably includes more than a few vivisected animals.
This is the sort of thing machine learning algorithms are pretty good at at.
Coupled with however many millions of interactions a day, you would have no problem correlating changes to your algorithm against increases in revenue.
But. It’s often not that impressive. Humans are equally good at noticing patterns.
All it takes is for one person at FB to see their wife or daughter delete a post, ask them “why did you delete that post” and take away from the response of “It made me look fat” to go “there’s a new targeted ad that’ll get me a bonus”.
In a similar vein, 80% of your banks anti-fraud systems isn’t deep learning models that detect fraudulent behaviour. Instead it’s “if the user is based in Russia, add 80 points, and if the account is at a branch in 10km of Heinersdorf Berlin, add another 50…. We’re pretty sure a Russian scammer goes on holiday every 6 months and opens a bunch of accounts there, we just don’t know which ones”.
I’d bet on it being algorithmic from Facebook because leaning into algorithms is part of that company’s culture. A bunch of manual tweaks require maintenance, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was thinking about this when deciding that deleted selfie should be a different signal to the algorithm than deleted picture of cat.
People who traded morals for money.
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you’re thinking: an asshole came up with it because it’s logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit’s trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
Can you make the algorithm open source that determined it was ok for you to murder Tuvix tho
if (ugly) { kill_child(child_name); } else { ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) }JANEWAY DID WHAT SHE HAD TO DO
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
💯 Big tech companies think they’re above the law.
Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.
If a law has a fine, it was created to deter poor people.
That depends on if it is a dayfine or not.
A fine of €500 for speeding will only really affect poor people, 30 dayfines which value is dictated by the wealth of the individual is a better system.
This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.
Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.
Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.
No, they are the system, and the system is held together by the law.
they ARE above the law, at least it would seem so.
History has shown that they are.
It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
Sexualization of children.
I hate to say it, but something is changing the physicality of age groups. At least I think that is what is happening. I swear there are teenagers today who look like adults in their 20s and young adults who don’t look over 18. I get scared seeing a conventionally attractive person (by stereotypical standards), wondering if I’m being a creep because I can’t identify their age group. Hell, I work among some people who easily can be mistaken for being under 18. Thankfully I know the company has a hiring minimum of 18.
EDIT: My point, that I should have stated, was if you surveyed a random sampling of a American suburban neighborhood, it might not be easy to identify age groups anymore.
It has always been this way. When you get old, 15 year olds and 19 year olds start to all look the same.
Similarly, to teenagers a 40 year old and a 60 year old look the same. Old.
It’s hard to say if it’s one of those things that older gens say is different with newer gens even though it the same. I will say though, the convergence of sexualization of children and infantilization of adults have been narrowing the gap and maybe one is winning over the other.
And mass sharing of images/videos which has made it so much easier to connect people, specifically in one case I saw today of someone on Telegram sharing child porn. How do you even put the cat back in the box?
People don’t want to hear it, but AI. Used intelligently and responsibly.
That does make sense, although I’m not sure we can trust it to work like that.
Unfortunately, the “used intelligently and responsibly” part is why people dislike AI - they don’t trust companies or people to use it that way (and for good reason based on the results so far).
Plus, it’s not gonna put everything back into Pandora’s Box. What we’re in is a societal and cultural arms race where AI is just another escalation that’s being used by both sides.
It’s funny you reference Pandora’s Box. I often use it to refer to the growth of AI and people’s resistance towards it. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not slowing down. We gotta make it work for us.
How did you see it
As little kids we got like no genderbased education from our parents. When we moved our grandmother got a lot more control and dumped blue boyish stuff on my brother and forbid the girly things. Has never worn a dress since and now is still not willing to wear one
(it could be that us older sisters influenced that he wants to wear dresses too)
I need context to understand your story. How old was your brother when you moved? How often was he wearing dresses before the move? How quickly did it stop? And how old is he now?
Bummer. Happens to almost all men in the US. Maybe less now, but this new red pill generation is wild.
Oh you mean fines? Sure here’s some money $$. Meanwhile AD rev is $$$$$. Just the cost of doing business! Hahahaa
Zuckerberg’s $300 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
Ah right, still in the north sea outside of Norway. Recently there was news of Sami villages being bribed to not put up a fuss when a “prominent person” wanted to go heliskiing, then his yacht arrived on site:
Can’t go skiing with the plebs, no.
“Plebs” go skiing 👀
Well, i’m Swiss and here it’s something most people do once or twice per season. But yeah, plebs from Zucks view, anything than the richest or most powerful people.
Translation of article from behind paywall: The Facebook CEO’s enormous yacht has been anchored in a Norwegian fjord near the Swedish border.
Now DN can reveal that several Sami villages have been offered compensation for not saying no to a “prominent person” going on a luxury helicopter skiing trip in the mountains.
- They wanted to buy our silence, says a representative of a Sami village.
At least three villages were contacted in March by a company that arranges helicopter skiing trips. The Sami villages have been offered compensation, ahead of a very secret group of tourists arriving to ski in the Swedish mountains in April. A Norwegian village team has also received a similar offer.
- We understood that it was something special. The organizers were very keen for us to say yes, even though this is before the calving season when the ewes are pregnant and all the reindeer are very fragile after a tough winter, says a representative of a Sami village.
Helicopter skiing in untouched lands, known as heliskiing, has been criticized by reindeer owners for destroying nature and disturbing the reindeer – and the issue has been raised by the Norrbotten County Administrative Board to the government.
According to sources from several Sami villages, the plans for this particular April visit were somewhat out of the ordinary.
The Sami villages, which use helicopters in their reindeer husbandry, were offered six hours of helicopter use by the organizer – which corresponds to around 50,000 kronor.
On April 1, one of the largest private luxury yachts in existence arrived in Bodö, Norway – something that caused a stir in the Norwegian media.
It is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Facebook company Meta, who is one of the richest people in the world. He is one of the billionaires who has tried to approach US President Donald Trump by, among other things, donating money.
My thoughts exactly.
How did they come up with this idea? Did the algorithm suggest this pattern, or did someone in marketing come up with it?
Fucking hell. That is vile!
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
Praise the king!
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
If I could go back in time to the moment when ARPANET was created and show them what it would become, I would also beg them to stop their efforts.
“You will create the thing that will destroy us.”
I’m not sure if it’s possible to build a healthy social network.
Smaller communities can work, if they’re well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.
Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.
So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.
Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
Even though Luigi Mangione didn’t actually commit any crime and his trial is a flimsy sham, I agree. He is the public face of whoever really did it, and they are an icon of justice.
Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
No one should
They shouldn’t, but also PSA to any parents but modern parenting advice typically is to let your kids use social media if they choose, and guide them through the social and emotional difficulties with good communication. Don’t blanket ban it because they’ll just use it anyways without guidance, and be unprepared the moment they turn 18.
It’s a case of: 99.9% of kids are smoking cigarettes so yours will too. Better to show them how to use a weekly cigar without inhaling, than just ban it which won’t work.
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
That’s sounds like blaming teens for the actions of the adults behind Facebook.
That’s a fallacy. Teenagers are the victims here. So I’m obviously blaming greedy corporations, lack of good parenting and proper regulation from authorities.
So teens should be allowed to go anywhere adults make it dangerous because it’s the adults’ faults? I hope you don’t have kids.
You will all make fine parents if you choose. Just slapping in some positivity and love here lol.
I wish I could ban old people from it as well because when their mental processing ability declines, so does their ability to detect bullshit news from bots
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it’s also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Facebook actively contributed to the genocide in Myanmar, and did basically nothing about it because they didnt want to hire more moderators that spoke the language, so that they could adequately remove pro-genocidal content
I hearby petition an amendment for an expansion of the child protective laws to widen the definition of abuse, neglect, and reckless abandonment of children to include:
“letting children browse without ad blockers”
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don’t think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the “risk” of them trying to go around it. “Their” version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn’t on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn’t going to happen …
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.
Ya!
Important to keep a semi-reasonable option in the major app stores, unless we want Social-Media-Tor dot Mirror or something to become the new hotness
How isn’t it possible? Just don’t give them phones, it’s not that complicated
Ok, when was the last time you saw a working payphone? 2010? It isn’t safe for teens to not have a phone because payphones don’t exist any more.
You can walk into any Walmart in America and buy a cheap smartphone for $30.
This approach is even less effective than “just don’t give them drugs”.
Ok, but you also need a data plan to go along w/ it (or regular visits to top up; is that still a thing?), plus hide it from parents, or you’re going to have a bad time.
Drugs are a different story. You can often get drugs from friends (free to start), can buy them a little at a time, and you don’t need to stash any at home. For a phone to be useful, it needs to be readily accessible, which means you’ll have it with you everywhere.
It’s possible, but it’s going to take a fair amount of work to hide a phone from a parent who’s paying even a little bit of attention.
The real problem here is parents. Parents need to step up and do a better job. Source: am a parent.
You don’t need a data plan if you can access wifi. There is public wifi and I don’t think most parents even know how to check the devices using their home wifi.
It’s not hard, and parents can easily change the WiFi password if they don’t know how to check the leases if they suspect something is up.
I’m very much in the camp of no filters and building a relationship on trust, but occasionally verifying if that trust is misplaced.
I’m a GenX that works with IT. I can tell you that none of my coworkers that are the same generation would know how to do any of that.
I agree that parents should be more involved with their children, but when do we hold a company responsible for the harm it causes?
Prohibition never works; people will always find other bad — maybe even worse — things to do. The human pressure to have social interactions may lead to creating terrible IRL friendships, ones that can be much more dangerous.
Instead, I would strongly advise for honest, mature conversations about the risks that social media comes along with. This can lead to a highly positive impact, especially if you teach how to observe interactions between people through social media, even if not interacting, yourself.
Prohibition works… temporarily. If you believe your child is not ready for SM, then prohibiting them from it until they are can work.
So yes, have a mature conversation with your kids, set boundaries, etc. That’s something that should happen between a parent and a child, not between a government and a child.
I actually agree with you, especially in the last sentence. Knowing the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, governments are definitely willing to manipulate children through control of information.
Look, maybe it’s true that parents should be doing a better job here. The thing is, that’s an individual solution. This is a systemic problem. How kids (and adults) interact socially and consume media is fundamentally changed over the last thirty years and we’re going to have to find ways to adapt to that as a society.
Yeah, in any particular individual case you can probably come up with a list of things the parent could have done differently. The reality is that this is a problem for tens (hundreds?) of millions of parents.
You can hand wave away any problem that affects children with “parents should do a better job”. It didn’t work for obesity, it didn’t work for child traffic deaths, it didn’t work for fentanyl overdoses, it didn’t work for school shootings, it didn’t work for measles, and it’s not going to work for this either.
I’m just going to copy/paste what I wrote in a previous comment in a similar thread:
Everybody is so quick to blame the parents in these situations. Maybe there is some truth to that, but people also need to reckon with the fact that kids (and adults) are being constantly inundated by Skinner box apps, and “platforms” full of engagement bait designed to be as addictive and attractive as possible. All run by corporations with functionally no regard for the safety of their users.
Yeah, sure, if you’re giving advice to an individual parent, they should probably be keeping a closer eye on what their kids are doing.
But there are systemic problems here that can’t be fixed with individual action. By laying the blame solely at the feet of the parents here, you are in effect putting individual parents up against dozens of huge corporations, each with armies of expert advertisers, designers, and psychologists working to build these products. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Based and marketing pilled
4chan is back online just so you know
Dystopian as fuck
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
I think I read somewhere that that was apocryphal, but it strikes me as 100% plausible. It doesn’t even have to be a matter of “write a system that detects pregnant women via their purchase history and send them coupons for maternity stuff” I think Amazon’s Frequently Bought Together feature could get it done. The same algorithm that suggests a tacklebox and some lures when you have a fishing pole in your shopping cart might recommend diapers and formula to those who buy maternity pants.
My doctor’s office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a “happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!”-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it’s just automated.
Don’t normalize this
Uh that’s new doctor time
I’d call my former Dr’s office and flip my shit. Them giving out your info may have been a HIPAA violation. You should really follow up and harass the fuck out of them.
I’m so glad I quit Facebook long ago and also started using uBlock Origin.
