Families often avoid conflict by not talking about politics and religion at the dinner table. Facebook is like being at the dinner table 24x7, except that it's designed so that you forget your entire family is there. It's also designed to make you angry and get you to talk about politics and religion. In other words, Facebook is designed to provoke conflict in families, which has torn many families apart that might otherwise still be able to tolerate one another.
It's designed to amplify ALL of our cognitive biases. As such, the fact that it propelled Trump to a win should surprise nobody, because that's what it was designed to do. Facebook is designed to give *Facebook* power, so they can sell that power to the highest bidder. It happened that the highest bidder turned out to be someone they didn't agree with philosophically, but THAT isn't the problem. The problem is that that power shouldn't exist to begin with.
@freakazoid This is a good point. This is what real name policies and 1 account/identity per person does.
@ajroach42 They do have "lists" but they are a PITA to use so most people don't.
@freakazoid & it's easy to make a mistake with their lists and not notice until you've caused a kerfuffle.
@ajroach42 Yeah if you wanted to do it right you'd show the faces of the people on the list very prominently around the composer.
@freakazoid Or let people legitimately create multiple accounts, with distinct profile pictures and account names.
Tumblr did an okay job of supporting multiple blogs from one account, in a way that was harder to accidentally screw up, but even then I preferred logging in to separate accounts.
@ajroach42 The Real Names policy *should* be unenforceable; the way they enforce is is downright evil, because they rely on people to report you for using a fake name. Which is fine when someone is trying to impersonate someone else, but the reporting mechanism ends up getting used as a means of harrassment far more often than impersonation is, and against far more vulnerable people, i.e. trans people.
@freakazoid When we ran the record store and were regularly publishing, there was a writer on our staff who was trans.
She published a thing about a religious figure, citing sources that the religious figure was queer.
She was reported for using a fake name in the immediate aftermath, and in the fallout was placed in physical danger.
@freakazoid Thankfully, she's a fuckin' trooper. When they came after her, she made them regret it.
The fact that FB has a tool essentially designed to harass trans people is a problem.
Whatever else they claim the tool is for, it is used to harass trans people, immigrants, and activists more often than anything else.
@ajroach42 This is why I define "intent" as "consequences that would be foreseen by a reasonable person". You can't see inside someone's brain but you can know that.
@freakazoid And that brings us to the EU's probable new copyright laws.
@ajroach42 Facebook is also tacitly supporting "internet passport" proposals, since politicians can point at their real names policy and their claimed intent behind it as justification for enforcing real names 'net wide.
That, plus the EU copyright thing, the death of net noot, GDPR, and the rest of the shitty internet stuff that has been ongoing just leaves me remembering this protest sign.
@freakazoid I use this image in every article I post about my BBS project.
I really need to find the time to work on that in earnest.
@ajroach42 Can I help? I keep thinking everything we want to do would be easier to do as a community, if for no other reason than it would help us stay focused and not jump from project to project if we had someone to be accountable to other than ourselves.
@freakazoid By all means!
I've never worked on anything like this with anyone remotely technical, so I don't know how to go about collaborating efficiently.
The current status of the project is mostly just a bunch of off the shelf stuff strung together with duct tape (and, honestly, I'm not even certain that I still have any working nodes.)
But the conceptual stuff is exciting.
I'd love to have your help.
@ajroach42 Do you have a project description/blog somewhere so that I can come up to speed on your goals and current status? A Google Wave would be fine ;-)
@freakazoid I have two mission-statement-y blog posts from 2016, lots of notes that are old enough that they don't reflect my current thoughts on the subject, and a couple of Mastodon threads I could *probably* dig up, with enough duckduckgoing.
So I guess that's where I start. Gotta write up a description of what we're building, and how I think it should work, and get it up somewhere it can live.
@ajroach42 @freakazoid don't call it gnunet
that's taken by some pure meh
@a_breakin_glass @freakazoid I wouldn't call it GNU anything, because stallman gives me the willies.
@a_breakin_glass @ajroach42 Does gnunet have political baggage, or are you talking technological meh?
@freakazoid @ajroach42 technological meh
@ajroach42 If Facebook really cared about the use of reporting as a harassment tool, there would be consequences for false reporting that are at least as severe as the consequences the person being falsely reported would suffer.
@freakazoid Then there's the fact that FB was sharing data with Palantir and ICE.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigration/
At that point, a Real Name policy becomes a direct tool of private and public harassment.
@ajroach42 Facebook is a totalitarian state.
@ajroach42 @freakazoid This is why I liked the simple and stupid Twitter & Mastodon model: just make it easy to use different accounts and save yourself the over engineering.
@kensanata @ajroach42 Yep. Facebook claim the real names policy is designed to make conversation more civil, but since it benefits them in so many other ways and also causes harm of it own I'm not inclined to take their word for it.
@freakazoid @ajroach42 there was a time when I thought using real names was important – back when The Wiki Way was young. But I’ve long since learned that I was wrong. Some people seem to prefer being wrong and so I must assume there is money involved somehow but I still don’t understand the economical benefit.
@kensanata @freakazoid Not money, power.
They use real name policies to silence and harass dissenters who are vulnerable.
It's much easier to dox the people that disagree with you if you know that them, and their relatives, are all oversharing in the same place.
@ajroach42 @freakazoid I know this is the effect but I can’t imagine engineers like myself sitting in a meeting and thinking oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I assume that they might consider the possibility but judged it unlikely and rare and considered some other benefit I don’t understand. That simply the Principle of Charity in action as far as I am concerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
It wasn't engineers that designed the real name policy, and it's not engineers that keep it in place.
And it's no secret that there are transphobes and racists working at most large companies. Facebook can't be the exception. It's simpler to believe that they are acting with malice than that they have been repeatedly told of the harm they are doing and have ignored it.
@ajroach42 @freakazoid @kensanata
OTOH, remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
@tomo @kensanata @freakazoid It has been years. At this point, if it wasn't originally malicious, it's become maliciously negligent.
@ajroach42 @freakazoid @kensanata
With that I can agree :)
Instead of „Oh, shit, we didn't intend that result, let's fix it” there is „Oh, we didn't intend that, but it kind of give us a lot of leverage". Evil by negligence/inaction.
@kensanata @ajroach42 @freakazoid the goal of a real name policy is to ensure everyone behind the keyboard can be identified as a unique consumer entity, for advertising purposes. multifaceted identities make it harder to monetize a social graph for advertisers. that's the money angle.
@garbados @ajroach42 @kensanata I worked for Facebook for four years and was definitely engaging in motivated reasoning about people's complaints. But nothing is going to change if we continue to allow this willful ignorance to be an excuse. This is what motivates my broad definition of intent.
@freakazoid
I like this line of reasoning.
@kensanata @garbados
@kensanata @ajroach42 @garbados IOW Facebook engineers aren't bad people because they set out to intentionally cause trans people to get harassed. They're bad people because it's happening, they have no excuse not to know it's happening, it is in their power to make it better, and they aren't making it better or quitting.
I have unpleasant memories from my time in those UseRealNames battles.
FWIW though I remembered you fondly from that time, no doubt in part from your very constructive approach around CommunityWiki, its license, and mirrored pages. No ill-will at all.
There are other proponents from then I might still grumble about, if pressed, but no need to go there just now.
Not sure, but isn't the economic benefit center on the idea of having a "full" profile of a person to trade in? Evading links amongst online personas is hard, but *making* those links also has a cost, which I'm sure the data merchants are keen to minimize.
@ajroach42 Which is of course exactly what they want, because the more control Facebook's ranking algorithms have, the more they can do to maximize engagement and ad revenue.
@freakazoid this is a good point BUT if your uncle is estranged because they think children in cages is totally okay, maybe that's a good conflict to be having.
A Twitterer who is Black made the point that when white families prize civility above morality, racists get to live comfy supremacist lives and get the liberals to compromise every time. Want a happy Thanksgiving? Don't say the N word.
@wilbr I am literally engaging in this exact fight with my uncle right now, not because he thinks children in cages are OK but because he's been defending the insidious "Obama did it too" argument.
@wilbr And ironically the fight started because of Facebook even though I'm not on it, because my wife complained about it. So maybe you have a point.
@freakazoid AH! And I was mixing both of those with this tread. (no sign-in required) https://www.facebook.com/intersectionalrainbowroom/photos/a.744925299014656.1073741829.618695268304327/1033065040200679/?type=3&permPage=1
@freakazoid @kensanata A relationship that can only be maintained by keeping your most important beliefs hidden is not a relationship worth saving.
@linkskywalker @kensanata I agree. The problem with FB is that they're often *not* the person's most important beliefs. In fact, I would say more often than not they're not that deeply held.
A person's political and religious beliefs ought to be important to them.
Though I won't make the argument FB engenders a healthy relationship with discussion.
And the thing is, Facebook is ALSO designed to get you to argue passionately for things you don't even really believe that strongly.