Hurting people at scale
Selected passages and quotes from Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman’s outstanding piece in Buzzfeed News, Hurting People At Scale: Facebook’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built
On July 1, Max Wang, a Boston-based software engineer who was leaving Facebook after more than seven years, shared a video on the company’s internal discussion board that was meant to serve as a warning.
“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” he wrote in a note accompanying the video. “If you think so too, maybe give this a watch.”
Most employees on their way out of the “Mark Zuckerberg production” typically post photos of their company badges along with farewell notes thanking their colleagues. Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year.
What the departing engineer said echoed what civil rights groups such as Color of Change have been saying since at least 2015: Facebook is more concerned with appearing unbiased than making internal adjustments or correcting policies that permit or enable real-world harm.
Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.
“All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News.
She said the company’s policy team in Washington, DC, led by Joel Kaplan, sought to unduly influence decisions made by her team, and the company’s recent failure to take appropriate action on posts from President Trump shows employees are right to be upset and concerned.
“These were very clear examples that didn't just upset me, they upset Facebook’s employees, they upset the entire civil rights community, they upset Facebook’s advertisers. If you still refuse to listen to all those voices, then you're proving that your decision-making is being guided by some other voice,” she said.
“[Zuckerberg] uses ‘diverse perspective’ as essentially a cover for right-wing thinking when the real problem is dangerous ideologies,” Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, told BuzzFeed News after reading excerpts of Zuckerberg’s comments. “If you are conflating conservatives with white nationalists, that seems like a far deeper problem because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about hate groups and really specific dangerous ideologies and behavior.”
“Facebook is getting trapped by the ideology of free expression. It causes us to lose sight of other important premises, like how free expression is supposed to serve human needs.” — Max Wang
Replying to Wang’s video and comments, Facebook’s head of artificial intelligence Yann LeCun wrote,
“American Democracy is threatened and closer to collapse than most people realize. I would submit that a better underlying principle to content policy is the promotion and defense of liberal democracy.”
Other employees, like [engineer Dan Abramov], the engineer, have seized the moment to argue that Facebook has never been neutral, despite leadership’s repeated attempts to convince employees otherwise, and as such needed to make decisions to limit harm. Facebook has proactively taken down nudity, hate speech, and extremist content, while also encouraging people to participate in elections — an act that favors democracy, he wrote.
“As employees, we can’t entertain this illusion,” he said in his June 26 memo titled “Facebook Is Not Neutral.” “There is nothing neutral about connecting people together. It’s literally the opposite of the status quo.”
Zuckerberg seems to disagree. On June 5, he wrote that Facebook errs on the “side of free expression” and made a series of promises that his company would push for racial justice and fight for voter engagement.
The sentiment, while encouraging, arrived unaccompanied by any concrete plans. On Facebook’s internal discussion board, the replies rolled in.
Hurting People At Scale: Facebook’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built, by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, Buzzfeed News, 23 July 2020
A permission structure for ignorance
“Search for Bill Bennett’s name on this site [Twitter], and you’ll see ‘Fox & Friends’ viewers cheering him on. And that’s the real problem. This show provides a permission structure for ignorance.”
CNN Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), 13 April 2020
Stelter was reacting to dismissive statements on Fox & Friends by William Bennet, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, about the severity of the Coronavirus.
Bennett smugly stated,
And now they say 61,000 people will die…I’m going to tell you I think it’s going to be less.“…We’re going to have fewer fatalities from this than from the flu. For this we scared the hell out of the American people…closed down the schools…closed the churches… This was not and is not a pandemic…Look at the facts.
At the time William Bennett made those statements — April 13, 2020 — 22,000 Americans had already died of COVID-19.
“Social media is a nuance destruction machine…”
The full quote, in response to a question about so-called “cancel culture”, was, “What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy.”
The Bible could not have known numbers such as these
India:
On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown.
…He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice?
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these.
The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.
Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km].
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.
“Us” means approximately 460m people.
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these.
The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.
Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border [over 500km].
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.
“Us” means approximately 460m people.
The Pandemic is a Portal, by novelist Arundhati Roy, on India's response to the Coronavirus. Financial Times, 3 April 2020
“I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
Brave New Workplace
1980:
The computerized control of work has become so pervasive in Bell Telephone's clerical sector that management now has the capacity to measure how many times a phone rings before it is answered, how long a customer is put on hold, how long it takes a clerk to complete a call. …Each morning, workers receive computer printouts listing their break and lunch times based on the anticipated traffic patterns of the day. …Before computerization, a worker's morning break normally came about two hours after the beginning of the shift; now, it can come as early as fifteen minutes into the working day. Workers cannot go to the bathroom unless they find someone to take their place. If you close your terminal, right away the computer starts clacking away and starts ringing a bell.
From Brave New Workplace by Robert Howard, in Working Papers for a New Society, Cambridge Policy Studies Institute, November-December 1980 (As cited in New Information Technology: For What by Tom Athanisou, Processed World, April 1981)
The essay ends with, “In a world where everything and everyone is treated as an object to be bought and sold, the new technologies — and most of the old ones for that matter — will inevitably create hardship and human misery. […] The ease with which computers are used as instruments of social control cannot be allowed to obscure their liberatory potential.”
Only until they are personal
Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot’s diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick.
On Facebook, Kathy Perilloux shared a similar conversion. Before March 16, Ms. Perilloux’s page was almost solely posts questioning the severity of the virus. March 10: “Hurricane Corona …. HYPE …. sigh,” she wrote. (“I stole that from Rush, but I was thinking the same before he said it!!!!!” she added in a comment.)
Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.
Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.
Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Her Facebook Friends Asked if Anyone Was Actually Sick. She Had an Answer, by Elaina Plott, New York Times, 19 March 2020
“We are living in a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations. The cracks in our medical and financial systems are being splayed open like a gashing wound.”
More Gibson than Gibson
“Welcome to 2020, time travelers, where white grandads fighting for racial equity mid pandemic are equipped with n95s and super charged leaf blowers to ‘blow the tear gas away.’”
Imagine a world in which
We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.
All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.
We’re not going back to normal, by Gideon Lichfield, Technology Review, 17 March 2020. With light edits.
In small places, close to home
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.
Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.
Eleanor Roosevelt, from her remarks known as "The Great Question", delivered at the United Nations in New York on March 27, 1958.
This quote was a little hard to track down, but I found this in Kathryn Kish Sklar’s essay in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: "Roosevelt's remarks were extemporaneous and no document of them survives… [She] was speaking at the UN on the occasion of presenting a pamphlet co-authored with Ethel Philips, In Your Hands: a Guide for Community Action (New York: Church Peace Union, 1958).”
A distribution channel for speech acts
“A distribution channel for speech acts is not a conversation.
On Twitter, people almost never do the thing that makes for real conversation: ask specific questions of other people about their lives.”
On Twitter, people almost never do the thing that makes for real conversation: ask specific questions of other people about their lives.”
@allafarce and @alexismadrigal, 28 February 2020
Often Matt Damon
Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, instead it is like real life: Hard, realistic, hopeful. Visionary fiction disrupts the hero narrative concept that one person (often one white man, often Matt Damon) alone has the skills to save the world.
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy, 2017. Page 148
By Rhododendrites - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, 10 June 2020 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90810352
Cultural Engagement to Mitigate Social Isolation
My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.
The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.
10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.
Our partners are,
Arts & Minds, New York, New York (with Howes Studio), with Carolyn Halpin-Healy, Nellie Escalante, and Deborah Howes
Akron-Summit County Public Library System, Akron, OH, with Jennifer Stencel
Center for Art and Public Exchange, an initiative of the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with Monique Davis
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, with Liz Neely
Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA, with Andrew Utt and Claudia Cano
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, with McKenzie Drake
Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ, with Deborah Kasindorf and Silvia Flippini Fantoni
RED EYE Theater, Minneapolis, MN, with Emily Gastineau, Jeffrey Wells, and Rachel Jendrzejewski
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, with Katherine Covey and Susannah Schouweiler
The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.
When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.
I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.
P.S.
In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.
Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!
“The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function”
https://twitter.com/ryanstruyk/status/1263661094024994818
This “extinction of the human race” statement is often attributed to Edward Teller but I can't find a reference to a specific time or place he said or wrote it. The closest I can find is the statement “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” by a Manhattan Project colleague of Mr. Teller, physicist Albert Allen Bartlett. See Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101 from Bartlett's website.
“When we balance out what’s more important, speed or accuracy, it’s not even a close call. We should be expecting accuracy and adjusting our expectations in regards to speed.”
20-cents off a can of corn
Most large companies doing business in California are required by the state’s new privacy law to disclose what they know about customers and how that information is used.
This resulted in fairly straightforward announcements by many businesses.
Then there’s Ralphs, the supermarket chain owned by Kroger.
…As part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs “may collect” information such as “your level of education, type of employment, information about your health and information about insurance coverage you might carry.”
It says Ralphs may pry into “financial and payment information like your bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history.” […]
Ralphs says it’s gathering “behavioral information” such as “your purchase and transaction histories” and “geolocation data,” which could mean the specific Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.
Ralphs also reserves the right to go after “information about what you do online” and says it will make “inferences” about your interests “based on analysis of other information we have collected.”
Other information? This can include files from “consumer research firms” — read: professional data brokers — and “public databases,” such as property records and bankruptcy filings.
[The article also notes that Ralphs' parent company Kroger also owns a company 'devoted solely to using customer data as a business resource' by aggregating data about its customers and selling it on the open market.]
“This level of intrusiveness seems like a very unfair bargain in return for, say, 20 cents off a can of corn,” Fordham’s Reidenberg said.
Is a supermarket discount coupon worth giving away your privacy?, by David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2020