Facebook: October 6

Why Hillary Clinton Fears the GOP’s Next Moves The former secretary of state worries that the conspiracies of the ’90s have brought us to the brink. ......... Hillary Clinton can draw a straight line from her duels with conservative media and Republican politicians in the 1990s to the January 6 insurrection—and

she fears worse is coming

. ......... I was not prepared to see people trying to have a conspiracy theory about 9/11—nor much of what followed in the years after with the rise of social media; the extraordinary dispersal of disinformation; the role, frankly, that the tech companies played by how they set up their algorithms, which really do favor conspiracy theories and the craziest, most eye-catching commentary ....... the role that Donald Trump and his enablers and others played in creating this absolute cauldron of conspiracy and hatred and anger and looking for explanations and scapegoats ..........

the determination, the relentless pursuit of power, the design of minority rule that we are currently watching happen

.......... Now they’re not only going to try to suppress votes on steroids; they’re going to try to change the way elections are determined. They’re going to try to give legislatures the power to basically throw out elections if they don’t go their way, because now they want to be able to win, even if they lose the popular vote and they legitimately lose the Electoral College. ........... keeping the filibuster now, when you’re dealing with a political party that does not respect the rule of law, does not even respect the process unless it works for them—witness what they did to Merrick Garland when President Obama had every right to appoint a Supreme Court justice. You see what they are trying to engineer by using the filibuster, but also equally important, what they’re doing in the states right now. ............... he new part [is] having your vote counted, because they want to replace independent people like we saw with the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who stood up to tremendous pressure—now they want to throw elections, if they can, either to state legislatures or if necessary to the House of Representatives, where the vote is counted by state.

We are in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

........... whether or not our democracy will be broken and then taken over. And minority rule will be what we live under, the norm. ........

We have more people now who are getting COVID—and there’s a vaccine—than in November.

.......... There is a reality, and then there is craziness and conspiracy and nuttiness. And you’ve got to stand up and say the facts, the facts, the facts, evidence, evidence, evidence. And guess what? There really is truth and reality. ......... he saw that the hard-core base of the Republican Party, particularly in his state, were excited, were thrilled, enthralled by his behavior, his contentious, combative, nasty comments about people—they really loved all that; they ate it up ..........

I served with a lot of the people who are lining up and saluting Trumpism. They’re giving up their values, their common sense.

........... I used to watch, when I was a student, newsreels of Hitler or Mussolini making speeches. And I would think, Who would follow that goofy-looking person? I mean, get a transcript of what they’re saying. What are they talking about? We’re looking at a phenomenon that is fueled not just by political calculation, partisan advantage, personal survival as a politician. We’re looking at a cultural phenomenon even more than a political phenomenon. The audience for anger, for fear or hatred, is so large in America right now, and as I said earlier, sadly, much of the responsibility has to lie with the tech companies who have been the channels for creating that kind of information system that we are now living with. .............. good for [YouTube] for finally taking down vaccine disinformation. They all should. Every single one of them should.

The people who are promoting vaccine misinformation are making money off of it.

........... show people that our government can actually work again, instead of being in a constant state of paralysis and absolutely nothing to show for it ...........

the plan on the other side is to win the presidency again, whether or not they win the popular vote and the Electoral College.

The Facebook whistleblower says its algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why. Frances Haugen’s testimony at the Senate hearing today raised serious questions about how Facebook’s algorithms work—and echoes many findings from our previous investigation. ........ an attempt to conclusively demonstrate that Facebook had willfully chosen not to fix the problems on its platform. ..........

Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy

.......... A safer, free-speech respecting, more enjoyable social media is possible. ....... Facebook can change, but is clearly not going to do so on its own ......... Facebook decides how to target ads and rank content based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of algorithms. Some of those algorithms tease out a user’s preferences and boost that kind of content up the user’s news feed. Others are for detecting specific types of bad content, like nudity, spam, or clickbait headlines, and deleting or pushing them down the feed. ..........

All of these algorithms are known as machine-learning algorithms.

.......... Unlike traditional algorithms, which are hard-coded by engineers, machine-learning algorithms “train” on input data to learn the correlations within it. The trained algorithm, known as a machine-learning model, can then automate future decisions. An algorithm trained on ad click data, for example, might learn that women click on ads for yoga leggings more often than men. The resultant model will then serve more of those ads to women. ............... machine-learning algorithms create a much more powerful feedback loop. Not only can they personalize what each user sees, they will also continue to evolve with a user’s shifting preferences, perpetually showing each person what will keep them most engaged. ........

Facebook’s algorithm incites misinformation, hate speech, and even ethnic violence.

........... “Facebook … knows—they have admitted in public—that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems in most of the languages in the world,” she told the Senate today.

“It is pulling families apart. And in places like Ethiopia it is literally fanning ethnic violence.”

...........

The machine-learning models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism: put simply, people just like outrageous stuff.

............... The most devastating example to date is the case of Myanmar, where viral fake news and hate speech about the Rohingya Muslim minority escalated the country’s religious conflict into a full-blown genocide. ......... “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features. .............. conducted “study after study” confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization. ......... the models learned to feed users increasingly extreme viewpoints. “Over time they measurably become more polarized” ........... how these phenomena are far worse in regions that don’t speak English because of Facebook’s uneven coverage of different languages. .................

Communities that speak languages not prioritized by Silicon Valley suffer the most hostile digital environments.

........... When fake news, hate speech, and even death threats aren’t moderated out, they are then scraped as training data to build the next generation of LLMs. And those models, parroting back what they’re trained on, end up regurgitating these toxic linguistic patterns on the internet. ............ Instagram’s internal research, which found that its platform is worsening mental health among teenage girls. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” .............. She also advocates for a return to Facebook’s chronological news feed. ........ “Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing,” Haugen told the Senate. “I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act, but we must act now.”

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story. Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it........ fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally. .......... dozens of countries, including India, Mexico, Afghanistan, and South Korea, where this type of abuse was enabling politicians to mislead the public and gain power. ......... In anticipation of writing it, she had turned down a nearly $64,000 severance package that would have involved signing a nondisparagement agreement. She wanted to retain the freedom to speak critically about the company. ........... Her account supplied concrete evidence to support what critics had long been saying on the outside: that

Facebook makes election interference easy, and that unless such activity hurts the company’s business interests, it can’t be bothered to fix the problem.

............ Fake engagement refers to things such as likes, shares, and comments that have been bought or otherwise inauthentically generated on the platform. The new team focused more narrowly on so-called “scripted inauthentic activity”—fake likes and shares produced by automated bots and used to drive up someone’s popularity........... The administrator for the Facebook page of the Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, had created hundreds of pages with fake names and profile pictures to look just like users—and was using them to flood the president’s posts with likes, comments, and shares. .............

“Everyone agreed that it was terrible,” Zhang says. “No one could agree who should be responsible, or even what should be done.”

.......... Azerbaijan, where the pages technique was being used to harass the opposition. ............ “She was blazing smart. She may be the smartest undergrad student I’ve ever worked with,” recalls Dragan Huterer, her undergraduate advisor. “I would say she was more advanced than a graduate student.” ......... She read a children’s book about a boy whose friends told him that if he kissed his elbow he would turn into a girl. “I spent a long time after that trying to kiss my elbow,” she says. ........ She did her best to hide it, understanding that her parents would find her transgender identity intolerable. But she vividly remembers the moment her father found out. It was spring of eighth grade. It had just rained. And she was cowering in the bathroom, contemplating whether to jump out the window, as he beat down the door. ..............

In the end, she chose not to jump and let him hit her until she was bloody

......... After being accepted to all the top PhD programs for physics, she chose to attend Princeton University. During orientation, the person giving a tour of the machine shop repeatedly singled her out in front of the group with false assumptions that she was less than competent. “It was my official introduction to Princeton ................ “I never received the support from the authority figures I needed … In each case, they completed the letter of their duty but failed the spirit, and I paid the price of their decisions.” ......... Wong, then a senior tech reporter at the Guardian, had been messaging Facebook employees looking to cultivate new sources. ....... The manipulation networks she took down quickly came back, often only hours or days later. “It increasingly felt like I was trying to empty the ocean with a colander” ............. On her last day, hours after she posted her memo internally, Facebook deleted it (though they later restored an edited version after widespread employee anger). A few hours later, an HR person called her, asking her to also remove a password-protected copy she had posted on her personal website. She tried to bargain: she would do so if they restored the internal version. The next day, instead, she received a notice from her hosting server that it had taken down her entire website after a complaint from Facebook. A few days after that, it took down her domain as well. ......... Without skipping a beat, she then rattles off the consequences that others have faced for going up against the powerful in more hostile countries: journalists being murdered for investigating government corruption, protesters being gunned down for registering their dissent. “Compared to them, I’m small potatoes,” she says.

Review: Why Facebook can never fix itself In An Ugly Truth, reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang reveal Facebook's fundamental flaws through a detailed account of its years between two US elections. ........ he brought up her Facebook profile on the company’s internal systems and began looking at her personal data. Her politics, her lifestyle, her interests—even her real-time location. ........... Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way. Instead they are

part of its very design, built atop Zuckerberg’s narrow worldview

, the careless privacy culture he cultivated, and the staggering ambitions he chased ............. In a chapter titled “Company Over Country,” for example, the authors chronicle how the leadership tried to bury the extent of Russian election interference on the platform from the US intelligence community, Congress, and the American public. They censored the Facebook security team’s multiple attempts to publish details of what they had found, and cherry-picked the data to downplay the severity and partisan nature of the problem. When Stamos proposed a redesign of the company’s organization to prevent a repeat of the issue, other leaders dismissed the idea as “alarmist” and focused their resources on getting control of the public narrative and keeping regulators at bay. .......... By 2017, ethnic tensions had devolved into a full-blown genocide, which the UN later found had been “substantively contributed to” by Facebook, resulting in the killing of more than 24,000 Rohingya Muslims. ............

Facebook will never fix itself.