Finally finished Careless People, and first of all: definitely recommend if you want a better idea of how the insides of some of these tech companies function in practice. Also good if you want to get very upset.
There's a lot to unpack from the book, but what's really sitting with me right now is Wynn-Williams' insider perspective on what happened with Facebook in Myanmar. 🧵
It was unsurprising because we have seen this play out again and again: horrifying atrocities happening that can be traced directly back to the unchecked spread of misinformation and hate speech.
& this isn't just letting the stray oblique racist comment slide, either— this is stuff like major influential figures calling for violence, it's massive troll farms laying the groundwork for ethnic cleansing and operating with impunity. As one colleague of mine puts it, "Facebook is just like 4chan".
It's true that content moderation at a massive scale is hard. It's expensive. It takes teams with immense context-specific knowledge, expertise, and precision to handle moderation in volatile online settings.
But even when these resources are handed to these companies on a silver platter— subject matter experts banging on the doors offering to help, researchers and activists sounding the alarm— they so frequently exhibit what Wynn-Williams so brilliantly calls it: "lethal carelessness".
"At every turn", she continues, "when Facebook's leaders see how facebook is inflaming tensions and making an unstable and frightening political situation much worse, they do... nothing."
It's what motivates me, as an engineer by training, to stay educated on the social and political contexts in which technology is developed, and pursue projects like Possible Futures. We *need* to understand why things are the way they are so we can remember: things can be otherwise.
@dylan
Follow The Money.
Inflaming tensions leads to more 'engagement' which means ppl are longer on your platform -> more ads -> more money.
Content moderation costs money, so the less the better (marketing: being proponents of free speech 🤮 ).
When it comes to #BigTech like Facebook, they only actually care about the US as the US gov is the only one who can influence them through legislation.
They won't ofc, but they could.
The Zuck in response to genocide:
"I think we should do better"
@dylan Yeah, even fully braced to have my mind blown, my mind was *still* blown by the level of, well, carelessness. The book's title is perfect.
I was listening to a podcast recently, and was really shocked (though, again, I shouldn't be) to learn that this is *still* happening with languages as common in this country as *Spanish*! Anything but English apparently goes almost completely unchecked. 🤯 😡
tsld
dylan
Free Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉
ratfactor