\u00ab\u00a0I am seeing a ton of coverage of our recent issues driven by stereotypes of our employees and attacks against fantasy, strawman tech cos\u00a0\u00bb wrote Facebook..<\/b>
\n\u201cI am seeing a ton of coverage of our recent issues driven by stereotypes of our employees and attacks against fantasy, strawman tech cos\u201d wrote Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos on Saturday in a reeling tweetstorm. He claims journalists misunderstand the complexity of attacking fake news, deride Facebook for thinking algorithms are neutral when the company knows they aren\u2019t, and encourages reporters to talk to engineers who actually deal with these problems and their consequences.
Yet this argument minimizes many of Facebook\u2019s troubles. The issue isn\u2019t that Facebook doesn\u2019t know algorithms can be biased or that people don\u2019t know these are tough problems, but that the company didn\u2019t anticipate abuses of the platform and work harder to build algorithms or human moderation processes that could block fake news and fraudulent ad buys before they impacted the 2016 U. S. presidential election, instead of now. And his tweetstorm completely glosses over the fact that Facebook will fire employees that talk to the press without authorization.
Stamos\u2019 comments hold weight because he\u2019s leading Facebook\u2019s investigation into Russian election tampering. He was the Chief Information Security Officer as Yahoo before taking the CSO role at Facebook in mid-2015.
The sprawling response to recent backlash comes right as Facebook starts making the changes it should have implemented before the election. Today, Axios reports that Facebook just emailed advertisers to inform them that ads targeted by \u201cpolitics, religion, ethnicity or social issues\u201d will have to be manually approved before they\u2019re sold and distributed.
And yesterday, Facebook updated an October 2nd blog post about disclosing Russian-bought election interference ads to congress to note that \u201cOf the more than 3,000 ads that we have shared with Congress, 5% appeared on Instagram. About $6,700 was spent on these ads\u201d, implicating Facebook\u2019s photo-sharing acquisition in the scandal for the first time.
Stamos\u2019 tweetstorm was set off by Lawfare associate editor and Washington Post contributor Quinta Jurecic, who commented that Facebook\u2019s shift towards human editors implies that saying \u201cthe algorithm is bad now, we\u2019re going to have people do this\u201d actually \u201cjust entrenches The Algorithm as a mythic entity beyond understanding rather than something that was designed poorly and irresponsibly and which could have been designed better.\u201d
Here\u2019s my tweet-by-tweet interpretation of Stamos\u2019 perspective:
He starts by saying journalists and academics don\u2019t get what it\u2019s like to actually like to implement solutions to hard problems, yet clearly no one has the right answers yet.
Facebook\u2019s team has supposedly been pigeonholed as naive of real-life consequences or too technical to see the human impact of its platform, but the outcomes speak for themselves about the team\u2019s inadequacy to proactively protect against election abuse.
Facebook gets that people code their biases into algorithms, and works to stop that. But censorship that results from overzealous algorithms hasn\u2019t been the real problem. Algorithmic negligence of worst-case scenarios for malicious usage of Facebook products is.
Understanding of the risks of algorithms is what\u2019s kept Facebook from over-aggressively implementing them in ways that could have led to censorship, which is responsible but doesn\u2019t solve the urgent problem of abuse at hand.
Now Facebook\u2019s CSO is calling journalists\u2019 demands for better algorithms fake news, because these algorithms are hard to build without becoming a dragnet that attacks innocent content too.
What is totally false might be somewhat easy to spot, but the polarizing, exaggerated, opinionated content many see as \u201cfake\u201d is tough to train AI to spot because of the nuance with which it\u2019s separated from legitimate news, which is a valid point.
Stamos says it\u2019s not as simple as fighting bots with algorithms because\u2026
\u2026 Facebok would end up becoming the truth police. That might lead to criticism from conservatives if their content is targeted for removal, which is why Facebook outsourced fact-checking to third-party organizations and reportedly delayed News Feed changes to address clickbait before the election.
Even though Facebook prints money, some datasets are still too big to hire enough people to review manually, so Stamos believes algorithms are an unavoidable tool.
Sure, journalists should do more of their homework, but Facebook employees or those at other tech companies can be fired for discussing work with reporters if they don\u2019t have PR approval.
It\u2019s true that as journalists seek to fight for the public good, they may overstep the bounds of their knowledge. Though Facebook\u2019s best strategy here is likely being more thick-skinned to criticism while making progress on the necessary work rather than complaining about the company\u2019s treatment.
Journalists do sometimes tie everything up in a neat bow when they\u2019re really messier, but that doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re not at the start of a cultural shift about platform responsibility in Silicon Valley.
Stamos says it\u2019s not a lack of empathy or understanding of the non-engineering elements to blame, though Facebook\u2019s idealistic leadership did certainly fail to anticipate how significantly its products could be abused to interfere with elections, hence all the reactive changes happening now.
Another fair point, as we often want aggressive protection against views we disagree with while fearing censorship of our own perspective when those things go hand in hand. But no one is calling for Facebook to be haphazard with the creation of these algorithms. We\u2019re just saying it\u2019s an urgent problem.
This is true, but so is the inverse. Facebook neded to think long and hard about how its systems could be abused if speech wasn\u2019t controlled in any way and fake news or ads were used to sway elections. Giving everyone a voice is a double-edged sword.
Yes, people should take a wholistic view of free speech and censorship, knowing both must fairly cross both sides of the aisle to have a coherent and enforceable policy.
This is a highly dramatic way of saying be careful what you wish for, as censorship of those you disagree with could bloat into censorship of those you support. But this actually positions Facebook as \u201cthe gods\u201d. Yes, we want better protection, but no, that doesn\u2019t mean we want overly aggressive censorship. It\u2019s on Facebook, the platform owner, to strike this balance.
Not sure if this was menat to lighten the mood, but it made it sound like his whole tweetstorm was flippantly produced on a whim, which seems like an odd way for the world\u2019s largest social network to discuss its most pressing scandal ever.
Overall, everyone needs to approach this discussion with more nuance. The public should know these are tough problems with potential unintended consequences for rash moves, and that Facebook is aware of the gravity now. Facebook employees should know that the public wants progress urgently, and while it might not understand all the complexities and sometimes makes its criticism personal, it\u2019s still warranted to call for improvement.<\/p>\n

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Sentiment rank: -1.3<\/div>\n

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