Comment by ilrwbwrkhv

2 years ago

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed.

Right? Wrong? Discuss.

15 comments

ilrwbwrkhv

Reply
sethammons  2 years ago

I can't put any facebook developer in the same bucket as a guard at a concentration camp.

  • gowld  2 years ago

    Because a concentration camp guard would be jailed or killed for refusing service, but a FB dev would lose a few $thousand in opportunity?

    • toolz  2 years ago

      Working at a faang level company is associated with a large enough increase in income that it could support a handful of families in developing countries. I don't know what purpose it serves to downplay just how substantial that amount of money is.

bentcorner  2 years ago

I think that was wrong. At the same time, drawing lines of good/bad at the boundaries of the people working at facebook is, imo, not useful.

NavinF  2 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1390/

I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

  • pfisherman  2 years ago

    The issue is the lack of informed consent. This is pretty basic ethical conduct of research stuff.

    • Jensson  2 years ago

      I have never seen a social media site ask for consent for A/B testing their new things. Everyone does this, I am pretty sure even the big news sites that wrote those headlines also does this without asking. The only thing facebook did differently was calling it research rather than A/B testing.

  • ilrwbwrkhv  2 years ago

    And this just proved my point. During the Nazi regime, everyone was hating the jews. And everyone was doing fascism.

    Now to bring this to a close, people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 and have lost the ability to see a clear ethical violation will be holding the guns and guarding the gas chambers when the next Hitler comes along. Meditate on this.

    Also this XKCD is dumb. Previously the feed was chronological post of friends which was definitely more ethical. But of course that didn't make people addicted enough.

    • gowld  2 years ago

      Did you get informed consent from me regarding the methods by which you constructed your comment? Or are you manipulating my emotions unethically?

    • mattmaroon  2 years ago

      If that proved your point, you didn’t have a point. If you can’t see the difference between genocide and lack of informed consent on a social network algorithm experiment you can’t be helped.

      I’m all for moral relativism, but there’s no future in which Facebook’s current actions aren’t at least reasonably debatable, and no past in which Auschwitz was.

      If you wanted an example of where the line gets blurry (it does sometimes, just not in either of these) I’d go with pharmaceuticals.

    • immibis  2 years ago

      One thing I have learned from the internet is that if you mention the Nazis or the Jews, you lose, good day sir, even if you are right.

      People are illogical.

      1 reply →

    • NavinF  2 years ago

      > people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000

      ???

      I said I don't find A/B tests unethical. Literally every tech company runs A/B tests just like that one. Why would I ask for 20k more?

      > Previously the feed was chronological post of friends

      Yeah, before they measured the impact of a good recommendation algorithm.

      1 reply →