Archives for posts with tag: Facebook

Artificial intelligence

March 10, 2021 //
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I had recently shared this image on FB:

“Those are called Witches Stairs. Allegedly, witches can’t climb up them. You will occasionally find them in very, very old New England homes.

(photo by Daphne Canard)”

Yesterday I got a notice from FB:

I presume this was the ‘consequence’ of some artificial intelligence employed by FB doing its job.

Doesn’t make much sense but…

For whatever reason, I made a screen capture of the notice and shared it on FB.
A friend asked me about the original post.
I looked it up and it was no longer there!
I searched FB for the picture… and there it was. Shared multiple times by multiple people. Sometimes with the accompanying text, sometimes baren.
And, at least once, bearing a very similar warning:

I’m not questioning FB motives for fact checking the information on its walls.
That’s a good idea.
Only I’m not so sure the ‘artificial’ intelligence FB uses to implement that idea is intelligent enough for the task….

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Facebook

October 2, 2019 //
0

Somebody asked, on his wall, ‘what do you like/dislike most about how people behave on Facebook?

Here’s my answer.

“Facebook presents us with huge opportunities.
For getting in touch with great ideas/very interesting people.
For con-artists to bamboozle other people’s minds.
What I like most? When people contribute. Ideas, feelings, whatever.
What I dislike? When people allow themselves to be taken advantage of.
You see, I could have said ‘I dislike people taking advantage of other people’. That goes without saying. Only telling a con-artist to clean up their act would be akin to asking a lion to stop feeding itself. That’s not gonna happen.
But we could train our minds to avoid being fooled so easily…”

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mindset, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust, Uncategorized

Don’t shoot the ‘Zuckerberg’.

March 21, 2018 //
2

So.
A bunch of ‘well intended people’ had somehow laid their hands on a ‘trove of personal data’ and used it, commercially, to influence electoral processes.
The data was gathered by ‘creatively’ exploiting the ‘opportunities’ put in place by the very existence of Facebook and by the manner in which so many people chose to use the said ‘social network’.

And most of us blame it on ‘Zuckerberg’.

OK, I can understand the psychology of all this.
I can also understand those who put the entire blame on anybody but ‘Zuckerberg’…

Let’s gather some facts.

“Facebook has lost nearly $50 billion in market cap since the data scandal”. recode.net, Mar 20, 2018
“In one day, Zuckerberg’s net worth fell $5 billion”. qz.com,  Second day it had fallen a further 4 billion…
Anyway, some 31 ‘missing’ billions used to belong to some other people but Zuckerberg.
Weren’t they supposed to take good care of their property? Weren’t they supposed to check what Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, was doing with their money?

 

“In Hidden-Camera Exposé, Cambridge Analytica Executives Boast Of Role In Trump Win” npr.org, March 21, 2018
“CA’s CEO wrote that the firm had “teamed up with Leave.EU” — then furiously backpedalled”
Impossible to say how much influence Cambridge Analytica’s efforts had over Trump becoming the 46-th American President or Brexit. If any at all.
Yet who bears more responsibility for these developments?
The guys who came up with those ideas in the first place? Trump and Cameron?
The guys who made them possible? The Republican Party Convention who had nominated Trump to run and the British House of Commons who had voted 544-53 in favor of the “United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016”?
The guys who had campaigned above the board, in any direction?
Those who had exerted their influence ‘under the radar’? ” “We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’sial media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online, and the campaign’s Facebook page is growing in support to the tune of about 3,000 people per day.”

Or those who, through their daily decisions, had created the premises for so many people to convince themselves that Trump was good enough for President and that it would better for Britain to ‘leave’?

Yeah, it’s only normal to blame others for our own mistakes.
But how sustainable is it?

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, freedom, limited rationality, manipulation, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

The real problem with the fake news that have taken over the Internet.

November 19, 2016 //
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fake-vs-real-news

“When Silverman (the author of the study that produced the chart quoted above) confronted Facebook with this data, the social media giant argued that…”

Why would anyone confront Facebook with something like that?

Facebook is happy that we, the users, share anything at all on our walls for others to read.

This is how Facebook makes its living. They sell add space on top on whatever we choose to share on our walls. From a mercantile point of view Facebook shouldn’t really care whether what is shared by its users is legit or not, they simply must enforce the rules – no pornography, no open incitement to hate, no bullying, etc., etc…

We do the sharing, we bear the responsibility for our acts.
And it is we who will, eventually, experience the full consequences.

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Choices we make, collective identity, limited rationality, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, politics, Psychology, The kind of world we live in, Trust
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