Facebook shut down efforts to make their site less divisive: what happened when their ‘VP of Integrity’ openly started commenting on this matter

Facebook shuts down efforts to make their site less divisive.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” […]

But in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.

[…]

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

Horwitz, J. (2020, May 26). Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts To Make The Site Less Divisive. WSJ. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499

In other words, Facebook know that they are fueling the problem and like it because they’re unreliable, extremely greedy, pathological liars, and cynical. Some nice people naturally work at Facebook, but this is about the company and what they truly aspire to, as in I care about their actions and not their words. This is mainly due to how they’ve lied time and time again.

So Facebook’s “Integrity Teams” can’t enforce integrity if it upsets the side of the U.S. political fence that is, quite obviously, more lacking in integrity.

Gruber, J. (2020, May 27). WSJ: ‘Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts To Make The Site Less Divisive.’ Daring Fireball. Retrieved May 27, 2020, from https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/05/27/wsj-facebook-divisiveness

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This news, originally reported by Wall Street Journal, is commented on via Hacker News.

The interesting bit about this is that Facebook’s ‘VP of Integrity’ started getting into the matter.

This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318729

If we overlook the fact that Facebook only recently stopped enabling advertisers to explicitly address ‘jew haters’, there’s a plethora of problems that Facebook not carried but created and continues to carry; See this blog post that I wrote a while back about some of their issues that hurt people.

So, how do some people react to the VP of Integrity’s comments on that Hacker News post about the Wall Street Journal article?

The fact that FB has not banned political ads is pretty shocking and absolutely related to this topic

Twitter managed to do it, but FB continues to allow political parties to spread misinformation via the algorithm, and FB profits from it

So essentially VP of Integrity, your salary is paid for in part by the spread of misinformation. Until you at least ban political ads your integrity is non-existent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319443

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Remember that VPN app that Apple pulled from the app store, the one that Facebook was using to spy on users’ internet usage to gain intel about potential competitors. When Facebook acquired the VPN app this guy came with the purchase. VP of Inegrity. Oh, the irony.

Another commenter noticed this first but the comment is buried at the bottom of the thread. You have to enable showdead to see it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319381

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319240

To conclude: Facebook try to make themselves out to be ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ yet fail to do so, simply because they’re still nefarious in the extreme. Check out their still-building track record of lies.

When I hear their arguments about how good and proper they are today, I’m reminded about this Monty Python sketch:

The difference is that Facebook don’t have any castles to stand on; their castles keep sinking due to their lying, greed, and vexing actions.

There are social networks that focus on stamping out abuse and hatred instead of creating it. Find those. At the very least, stay away from Facebook.