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We're Thinking About Facebook Wrong

2021-10-07 · explainer · Hank · 21:42 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook, calendar ritual, self promotion

After Facebook's outage and Frances Haugen's leaked research, Hank argues we are at the very beginning of a communication revolution and bad at it, that platforms' promotion feeds a loop of fear and righteous superiority, and that Facebook, already regulating society, should be responsible for what it promotes.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Facebook's outage, the 'Facebook is gone' tweet and Frances Haugen's documents

  • ★★ During Facebook's outage a tweet claiming Facebook might be gone got 400,000 likes and retweets; Hank says it rested on a misunderstanding of how websites work. — 00:00:00 · Facebook, Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank says the time something is happening is the worst time to learn about it but when we most want to, the root of one destructive mechanism of social media on any platform. — 00:00:29 · social media
  • ★★ Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen released a trove of documents of Facebook research on itself, which found it was not great; Hank says Facebook promptly ignored and kind of hid that research. — 00:00:58 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says many people depend on Facebook for their businesses, social lives, families and loved ones abroad, so those gleefully celebrating its outage are not the best guides. — 00:01:13 · Facebook

00:01:27 — Exempt from the four-minute rule; Facebook's power over moods, communities and politicians

  • ★ Hank says this very long video is educational, which exempts it from the vlogbrothers four-minute rule. — 00:01:27 · Four-minute rule
  • ★★ Hank says 15 years ago, when Justin Timberlake was bringing sexy back, Facebook was only for high school and college students; now it is the sixth most valuable corporation and possibly the most influential. — 00:01:56 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank says Facebook's internal research has shown it can affect people's moods, and that it can inform or misinform, and make communities thrive or vanish, not for 60,000 people like Missoula but for billions. — 00:02:15 · Facebook, Missoula, Montana
  • ★★ Hank says that thinking hard about it, Mark Zuckerberg might be the most powerful person ever to exist, not a comforting thought. (hedged) — 00:02:43
  • ★★ A coalition of European politicians wrote to Facebook that its platform forces them into more extreme positions than they or their constituents want, to win the attention and engagement game. — 00:02:50 · Facebook, attention economy
  • ★★★ Hank says politicians' incentive is to get elected, so they play the attention game; the social internet keeps would-be good public servants away and makes life miserable for every politician who is not a garbage human. — 00:03:12 · social media

00:03:42 — We are at the beginning of a communication revolution and bad at it; Haugen's testimony; Facebook will keep existing

  • ★★★ Hank says every moment feels like the destination but turns out to be a step on the way; we are at the very, very beginning of this. — 00:03:42
  • ★★★ Hank thinks the most disruptive human technologies are communications technologies, not weapons: radio was great for the Nazis, and the printing press fractured the Catholic Church. — 00:04:26
  • ★★ Hank used to think his belief that the social internet was as big a deal as the printing press was irrational; now he thinks it entirely rational, even common. — 00:04:44 · social media
  • ★★★ Hank says platforms, viewers and he himself are all bad at this: it is a revolution in human-to-human communication and a baby, with no systems yet for many-to-many decentralized communication. — 00:04:55 · Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says some thoughtful people need to engage seriously with social media, and viewers may be among them. — 00:05:47 · social media
  • ★★ Hank was impressed by Frances Haugen's congressional testimony and the questions, which showed deeper understanding; maybe useful conversations are starting. — 00:05:56 · United States Congress
  • ★★ Hank says it is easy to say Facebook sucks, which he does all the time, but much harder to imagine how to make it better. — 00:06:16 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says Facebook is going to keep existing; Zuckerberg pulling the plug would be a 'hundo P baller move' but seems unlikely. — 00:06:23 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says Zuckerberg has many incentives to believe Facebook does more good than harm, so he will probably believe it whether or not it is true, which Hank does not know. (hedged) — 00:06:37 · Facebook

00:06:45 — Mental model of Facebook: consumers, creators, platform; fear, righteous superiority and the feedback loop

  • ★★★ Hank's model of Facebook has three power centers: people who consume content, people who create it, and Facebook, which hosts and promotes it. — 00:07:06 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says the three groups' incentives align well, which is how Facebook became worth a trillion dollars. — 00:07:28 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says creators want their numbers to go up for status or money; it feels good, and divorcing self-worth from internet numbers takes much work; Facebook supplies feedback that rewards making content. — 00:07:35 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank wants to stop talking about outrage, since he doesn't know what it is, and talk instead about fear and righteous superiority. — 00:08:30
  • ★★ Hank says afraid people feel strong emotion and want to share and confront what they fear; news always knew this. — 00:08:42
  • ★★★ Hank says what we often call outrage is righteous superiority: feeling good by being better than others, seductive because you need not do anything to be good. — 00:08:55 · social media
  • ★ Hank says righteous superiority is not new, it mattered to Martin Luther, and people are often right in it, as vegans are. (playful) — 00:09:20
  • ★★★ The platform's incentive is to keep people on and sell more ads, so a feedback loop promotes righteously superior content, which more people make and consume, and groups then feel superior to each other. — 00:09:40 · online advertising
  • ★★ Hank says running that loop for about ten years may leave everyone spun up like Beyblades thrown into a fishbowl of fragile institutions. (playful, hedged) — 00:10:18

00:10:47 — Facebook's call to be regulated and why it is not as good as it sounds; Facebook as corporation and government

  • ★★ Users and creators are dispersed and uncontrollable, but Facebook is centralized and makes $85 billion a year, a more attractive and controllable target for regulators. — 00:10:47 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank says Facebook's statement asking lawmakers to act is a good point, but it amounts to 'you fix it', with no advice or insight offered, shifting responsibility to them. — 00:11:45 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank says Facebook is not just a place where content goes: it decides what people see, making millions of decisions per second about the world people experience. — 00:12:32 · Facebook
  • ★★ Stricter hate-speech and incitement lines constrict some parties' speech more; right-wing politicians claim censorship and threaten rules barring platforms from policing themselves, which Hank says would be a disaster. — 00:13:29
  • ★★★ Hank says Facebook is saying 'tell us what to do', fearing that doing more than the minimum would get its ability to act regulated away, so until then it focuses on profit. — 00:14:08 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says regulation would cover all internet companies, and regulations often advantage large incumbents by raising barriers to entry. — 00:14:30
  • ★★★ Hank says he is very pro-regulation of these companies, but not so much that he will ignore reality. — 00:14:44
  • ★★ Hank says Facebook will ask to be regulated but fight every individual regulation tooth and nail. — 00:14:58 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank says it is easier for legislators to yell that Facebook sucks than to write legislation that improves it, and shouting makes them and constituents feel righteously superior. (playful) — 00:15:11 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank says Facebook is kind of both corporation and government: it is in charge of the part of your life spent there, which it would like people not to realize. — 00:15:48 · Facebook
  • ★ Hank notes he has been recording for 50 minutes. (playful) — 00:16:05

00:16:18 — Platforms decide what gets promoted and should be responsible for it; Facebook already regulates society

  • ★★★ The real danger and power of platforms is not hosting but deciding what gets new eyeballs; promoting is an active editorial decision by the company, even when made by an algorithm. — 00:16:18 · Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, recommender system
  • ★★ Promoted hateful groups, trending anti-vax points and YouTube's alt-right pipeline are decisions by platforms that didn't think about it; every algorithmic platform has this problem, TikTok too, Hank jokes. — 00:17:04 · recommender system, TikTok, YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank agrees only in a limited way that Facebook is responsible for content it hosts (hate speech, illegal content), but believes much more that it should be held responsible for what it promotes. — 00:17:33 · Facebook
  • ★★ Using AI to take down individual hateful posts while keeping the self-reinforcing engagement loop is like putting out fires behind a dune buggy full of flamethrowers; Hank feels that conversation is starting. — 00:18:02

  • ★★★ To respected people who say regulating social media means regulating society, Hank replies that Facebook already regulates society, with a narrow, short-term focus on ad money. — 00:19:04 · Facebook, social media

    “Facebook is already regulating society”

00:19:28 — No good advice: immunities, computer scientists, legislators; we are at the very beginning

  • ★★ Hank thinks we won't educate people out of responding to fear and indulging righteous superiority, though there are some signs that maybe immunities kick in; but Facebook cannot be called bad only because humans make bad decisions. — 00:19:28 · Facebook
  • ★★ Hank encourages all computer scientists to work on getting platforms to recognize when they promote societally or personally destructive content. — 00:20:14
  • ★★ Hank says it would be very hard for Facebook to make a profit in a world completely ripped apart by Facebook. — 00:20:20 · Facebook
  • ★★★ Hank doesn't know what legislators should do, but opposes making platforms responsible for everything posted, which would end them, and favors holding them responsible for what they promote. — 00:20:30
  • ★★ Hank doesn't know if the world would be better without the many-to-many communication system, but knows his life would be very different without it. (unsure) — 00:20:50 · social media
  • ★★ Hank says in 20 or 30 years we will look back at the way things are now and find it quaint, clunky and hilariously bad. — 00:21:05

00:21:15 — Sign-off and Pizzamas plug

  • ★★ Hank doesn't know how we will move forward from here, but knows we will. — 00:21:15
  • ★★ Pizzamas products are available only during Pizzamas, for about another week, then never again; all profits support the community's work on health care in Sierra Leone. — 00:21:20 · Pizzamas, Sierra Leone

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description adds that righteous superiority and fear work best on people who struggle with self-worth, especially those denied expected status, and the two almost always go hand in hand. — video description
  • ★ In a comment Hank says that by Facebook he mostly means any algorithmically controlled content platform. — creator comment · recommender system, Facebook

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Facebook · recommender system · regulation · self-righteousness · social media

Also: People: Frances Haugen · Justin Timberlake · Mark Zuckerberg · Martin Luther

Projects: Pizzamas

Works: SexyBack

Organizations: Catholic Church · TikTok · Twitter · United States Congress · YouTube

Rituals: Four-minute rule

Concepts: artificial intelligence · attention economy · fear · hate speech · moral outrage · online advertising · political party · political polarization · printing press · radicalization · self-esteem · Vaccine hesitancy · Veganism · vicious circle

Places: Missoula, Montana · Nazi Germany · Sierra Leone

Also centred on regulation: ANOTHER Oil Rig Explosion?! REALLY?!

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