Teagan > Recent Status Updates

“Dyson’s mother had the personality of a plasma globe: the crooks of light inside her awoke to the slightest human interaction.”

“The bottom line was that we couldn’t hurt our bottom line,” observed one Facebook data scientist who worked on the changes. “Mark still wanted people using Facebook as much as possible, as often as possible.”

After the 2020 election, FB instituted the “Nicer News Feed” for five days. They tweaked the algorithm to promote more credible sources such as NYT and WSJ rather than Daily Caller. FB became a less divisive place, but users spent less time on the platform.

I don’t understand what led to the reversals on election integrity infrastructure and limited removal of hate speech (Holocaust deniers, antifa, some QAnon and white supremicist groups). What made Zuckerberg decide his previous positions—especially his absolutist view that paid speech is protected speech—were untenable in mid 2020?

It’s so interesting that Sheryl Sandberg was at odds with Zuckerberg from the start, when they’re so often presented as a power duo. She’s in charge of executing decisions he’s made but is personally conflicted about. And then, as one employee put it after the BLM protests, “Either she has no power or she is complicit, or both.”

Chris Hughes on the $5B FTC fine in the wake of Cambridge Analytica:

“I was outraged. Privacy violations were just the cost of doing business.”

Shares rose after the news, as quarterly earnings and ad revenues were up. The record fine was just 3.5 percent of revenues.

Reminds me of the SEC fine against JP Morgan Chase this month for improper record keeping/potential bookkeeping fraud. $125M is pocket change.

CIA veteran Yaël Eisenstat was hired as Head of Global Elections Integrity Ops after the congressional hearings. She found that Facebook engineers were interested in building infrastructure to fact-check political ads and monitor voting disinformation. Her hiring was largely for show it seems, as her efforts to protect elections’ integrity were shut down before they began, both by her direct managers and FB execs.

A longtime FB executive: “He couldn’t understand that speech isn’t a black-and-white issue. He wasn’t interested in the nuance, or the fact that when it comes to speech, there are certain things people simply feel, or know, are wrong.”

And that’s how Zuckerberg takes the position of defending Holocaust deniers 1A rights, even though he’s Jewish and finds their opinions personally abhorrent.

“….He wanted clear rules that one day could be followed and maintained by AI systems that could work across countries and languages. Removing human beings, with their fallible opinions, from the center of these decisions was key: people made mistakes, and Zuckerberg, especially, did not want to be held responsible on a case-by-case basis.”

“Zuckerberg viewed speech as he did code, math, and language. In his mind, the fact patterns were reliable and efficient….

“There are maybe one hundred languages spoken, and more that are dialects, but Facebook thought it was enough to have Burmese…. It would be like them saying, well, we have one German speaker, so we can monitor all of Europe.”

-An activist in Myanmar on the lack of content moderation during the Rohingya genocide. There was one community operations manager, in Dublin, for a country with 18M FB users.

In 2018, Facebook spent more than Chevron or Pfizer on lobbying, $12.6M, making it the 9th largest corporate lobbying office in DC. Facebook’s PAC donated to the campaigns of over half the lawmakers questioning Zuckerberg at the 2018 congressional hearings. Company stock rose 4.5% (>$3B) after the hearings concluded, which the author implies was due to the press focusing on the legislators’ lack of tech know-how.

According to an investigation by ProPublica, Facebook has over 50k unique categories for advertising.

Had no idea that the Cambridge Analytica scandal originated with Open Graph, a program that sold users’ data to developers. Data included users’ names, email addresses, cities of residence, birthdays, political affiliations, and employment history. The program ended in 2014, but not before Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan turned over the results of his personality quiz to CA, in violation of FB dev rules.

A security engineer, “They [Sandberg and Zuckerberg] honestly treated security like it was something they wanted taken care of quietly, in a corner, where they didn’t have to regularly think about it.”

Facebook knew as early as March 2016 that Russians were attempting to hack and surveil US accounts connected to the 2016 presidential campaigns, and they did nothing for fear of being seen as political.

No explanation for how content was banned, everything was ad hoc (like a startup not a mature company).

Dave Willner, content moderation team member, on the list of topics for banned content, “If you ran into something weird you hadn’t seen before, the list didn’t tell you what to do. There was policy but no underlying theology. One of our objectives was: Don’t be a radio for a future Hitler.”

Key: “The meeting [with conservative leaders] was a turning point for Facebook, which until then had pledged political neutrality. And it marked a pivotal moment for Sandberg, whose decisions would become increasingly dictated by fears that a government backlash would harm the company’s reputation and invite greater government scrutiny.”

It’s laughable that deciding what hundreds of millions of users see as trending isn’t an editorial decision, especially considering that these contractors were hired for their journalism background. Not sure how the company can justify being shielded from the threat of libel lawsuits that keep traditional media organizations on their toes.

It’s not surprising at all that the Trending Topics are manipulated and not really trending per the algorithm at all. Instead, underpaid recent J-school grads/contractors subjected to “grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secret, imperious culture” are choosing to highlight recycling on Earth Day and instead of the actually more popular, more banal topics like The Bachelor and Kardashians

So creepy that the executive team was investigating a leak of an internal memo (re Facebook’s reaction to BLM) by searching through employees’ WhatsApp data and eventually personal GChat accounts. It’s shocking that they made it 11 years without a leak.

“There are no gods anymore, Hel. We’re all only men.”

-Baldur to Hel when she awakes after Ragnarok

When Hel squeezed her eyes shut, several tears leaked out, and Angrboda wiped them with her sleeve. Hel was too weak to bat her away and said, anguished, “It’s not fair. My entire life was wasted down there, and when we finally could’ve seen each other I kept you away… and now we’re all doomed…”

-Hel to Angrboda

“Why did you do it, then?” Angrboda whispered. “Why did you kill your brother’s son?”

“The gods took everything from us, Boda,” he whispered back. “I thought it was high time I took something from them.”

[….]
And then another thought struck her.
Let Hel hold what she has.
“Took something—someone—from them,” she said slowly, “and gave it to our daughter.”

“A part to play,” Loki echoed, looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Boda, I told you the very first time we met that I want nothing to do with your depressing prophecies. I make my own way—I choose my own fate. You can’t take that away from me.” His tone turned pleading. “You mustn’t.”

“You have the power, don’t you? To protect me?”

“Perhaps I could, but I won’t.” She held his gaze. “You were right. I married you and mothered your children. That’s all there is for me. That’s all anyone will ever know. The worlds go on, and you have a part to play in what’s to come.”

-Loki and Angrboda

Hel whipped aside the bottom of her dress to show her legs merely bone now, with blue-gray flesh still clinging in some places, held together by only a few tendons and a lot of magic.

Angrboda stared. That was all she could do.
(2/2)

“Do you know what’s been done to me? Hel shot back. “I should never have been born, but you—you had to meddle….Now here I am, with power over life and death but only a sad half-life to call my own, cast away from all worlds, alone forever. Where have you been all this time, Mother? Where have you been while I rotted?”
-Hel to Angrboda (1/2)

…choose to be nothing more.” (3)
-Loki to Angrboda

“It beats hiding in a cave at the edge of the world, being scared of everything,” Loki shouted in her face now, his scarred lips twisting in scorn. “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand, because all they will remember of you is the name you chose for yourself, Angrboda. Not that you were Gullveig, not anything else. They will know you as my wife and the mother of monsters (2/3)

“Why am I not worshipped like the test? What are gods if they’re not worshipped? What does that make me? Reckoned among them, but not one of them. Never one of them.”

“Is that all that matters to you?” Angrboda demanded. “Worship and being well know? Is that really why you make mischief, just for attention? Just so people will remember you in some far-distant future?” (1/2)