Manipulating the News Feed to show users pro-Facebook articles is...so obviously and blatantly unethical that I'm surprised so many people were willing to authorize it.
As someone who works at a not-small tech company, I try to practice the whole "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". After all, most tech companies exhibit some behavior that is objectionable. But Facebook... I honestly don't know how their employees are comfortable working there.
> I honestly don't know how their employees are comfortable working there.
Probably most of the people who don’t feel comfortable with facebook’s role in society have already selected themselves out of the employee pool. If you’re the sort of engineer Facebook wants to hire, and you have a strong sense of ethics, there’s no shortage of well paid work you could do instead.
The people who end up at FB are the people who don’t see a problem or don’t care.
I understand the sentiment but don’t think that’s fair. Not everyone gets to choose from their pick of job offers, and some people have serious financial commitments and dependents. If FB is the only job offer you have that pays the bills, is it really wrong to take it?
I have FB on my resume. I make hiring decisions. I will delete any applicant who was at FB over the past three years without a moment's hesitation. You do not take an FB offer to 'pay the bills', you take it because you want to acquire a big pile of money.
There was a point pre-IPO where you could think that you were actually trying to do something cool, interesting, and overall were helping people stay connected with each other. Then there was a point where you could tell yourself that you were working on some big and interesting problems and if you didn't do your job well or nail some very tricky problems then it would have a negative impact on people's lives (or even get people killed if you messed up security/privacy and revealed info about some people.)
Then one day you wake up and realize you are a prostitute working in Zuck's brothel, but unlike a real sex worker your actions are ending up fucking millions of people a day. If you don't leave at this point you are as unethical as the people around you.
Wow. So do you have a list of objective criteria you use to decide which list of companies is morally acceptable for your candidates to have worked at, or are you just coming up with an arbitrary list based on your emotions and limited personal experience? Isn’t this also incredibly hypocritical given that you admit to working at FB yourself in the past? Shouldn’t you technically fire yourself, or do you of course consider your circumstances an exception?
> do you have a list of objective criteria you use to decide which list of companies is morally acceptable for your candidates to have worked at
As a matter of fact I do.
> Isn’t this also incredibly hypocritical given that you admit to working at FB yourself in the past
It is. I excuse myself by saying that it was creepy but not overtly evil at the point where I left. To be honest, I think I got out at just the right time to have a small shred of morality left, but of course I would say that and others may differ. I am sure lots of people do not care, and the fact that my work at FB in its early days gets me interviews shows this to be a widespread opinion, but I have been inside the factory and have seen how the sausage is made. I have a date I keep in my head, and if you were at FB after that point you would be a 'no hire' for me.
Yeah. So you worked at FB, made your dirty money, got your new role, and are now demonizing others who made the same decision as you. But it’s different for you, or course, and easy to do now that you’ve made your cash. You are just as immoral as the candidates you are rejecting, if not more.
Your childish belief that companies are static entities and that the moral calculus of a job doesn't change over time makes this entire conversation a fools errand. Searching for simple black and white answers for complex problems never seems to work well. Sorry you were never good enough to make the cut and will never face these kinds of questions, but the simple fact is that at one point it was different and the company grew into something else entirely.
> If FB is the only job offer you have that pays the bills, is it really wrong to take it?
At least on the engineering, product management, etc. side of things, if you can get an offer at FB, it's highly unlikely you can't get offers elsewhere.
Of course, there are only so many companies that can offer FB level compensation. Which, if we're being honest, is why FB continues to be an employer of choice for so many people despite its atrocious ethics track record.
They pay extremely well. I have a friend who moved to Facebook and complained all the time the first couple of months, but the third month or so he was like even with London living expenses the money is really great.
Why are you using a throwaway to mischaracterize what the reporter wrote?
He literally wrote: "So to be clear: Project Amplify, in this iteration, does not involve any algorithm changes to news feed (which we don't say in the story). But it still involves Facebook pushing pro-FB content into News Feeds in a pre-determined fashion to boost its reputation."
The feed ranking wasn't change, but the News feed is being manipulated by adding pro-FB content to it and he stands behind what he wrote. The article never said the News feed algorithm was changed.
and don't forget shelving their own comissioned reports that didn't fall in line with the pro-facebook narrative:
"Mr. Schultz argued that Facebook should publish its own information about the site’s most popular content rather than supply access to tools like CrowdTangle, two people said. So in June, the company compiled a report on Facebook’s most-viewed posts for the first three months of 2021.
...
A day before the report’s publication, Mr. Schultz was part of a group that voted to shelve the document, according to the emails."
But what company out there releases internal reports that would not show it in a good light? Have you ever worked at a company that just airs out its dirty laundry like that? This is an unreasonable expectation that is applied to no other company.
I don't agree with the factual claim: As examples, IT industry businesses publish their flaws and internal investigations into them all the time, about massive security failures, for example. If a plane crashes, they manufacturer and the airline are expected to be very open. Facebook has great power over our communities, and thus we have very high expectations.
The parent's 'expectation' that businesses (or individuals) only act in their own immediate interests, and not in the interests of their communities, is an odd contemporary idea that humanity's worst instincts are the 'true' and necessary ones, while humanity has many instincts, good and bad, and it's our free will to choose. It also ignores even 'enlightened self interest': Our society is falling apart, and social media plays a major role; you don't sh-t where you eat.
not saying its right, but all the tech companies do it. Blind for instance will remove a post within minutes if you create a post saying 'blind is censoring our posts', as they did with me. Surprised I didn't get banned but maybe that's coming.
It certainly feels like a hail Mary attempt to save their image, especially given the recent media barrage. Anecdotally at least, it feels like most of my friends who used the platform 5 years ago are no longer active on it.
What does that have to do with anything? That's not what's described in the article.
It's "an informational unit clearly marked as coming from Facebook". It's similar to the units that facebook has for vaccine information or voting information.
The traditional media is FB's competition, though. Why should a company be obligated to host links to negative publicity paid for by a competitor? I assume you don't think that the NYT should be required to print anti NYT articles written by FB, right?
The comment you responded to said "unethical"; there are many things that are unethical that are not illegal (though I am not claiming this should not be, as Facebook is supposedly providing a communications platform here... but it doesn't matter if it should or shouldn't be: ethics is not law).
You are right. But I don't think it's unethical either. Just like I don't think it's unethical that the NYT doesn't run anti NYT articles written by FB.
edit: When it comes to censoring content by political opinion, then I'm more towards the unethical side, but I think it's a step to far to expect any company to allow it's platform to be used to spread attack pieces against itself.
The NYT and FB are two different kinds of entities, and I don't think you can judge similar (hypothetical) actions that either one might take.
The NYT is a news outlet. They publish what they believe is newsworthy, interpreted with whatever biases they might have. They don't just take random things that other people have published (or want to publish) and publish them.
FB is a social media site. They don't "publish" things; they provide a platform for their users to share things that interest them (and a platform for advertisers, but that's not really relevant here). If a user shares something that praises FB and another user shares something critical of FB (let's assume for the moment that both the praise and criticism are accurate, to preempt the "misinformation" argument), it is absolutely unethical for FB to over-promote the praise and bury the criticism. That's pretty much the textbook definition of unethical.
Facebook doesn't present itself as a media company to its users though. It presents itself as a social platform allowing people to communicate, and the expectation from the user is that you will see content that is popular and/or being shared by your friends without any editorial control/oversight such as downranking "inconvenient" truths.
It's also not done transparently, it would be one thing if FB turned around and outright said "this is inconvenient to our business, so we won't allow you to post it", but in this case they silently downrank the content behind the scenes.
> you don't think that the NYT should be required to print anti NYT articles written by FB
Facebook isn't journalism; it's not comparable. The NYT does publish results of internal investigations into flaws, as do many other businesses, including much of the IT industry (all those open after action reports, for example).
Openness and transparency are necessary antidotes to concentrated power.
