Alex Stamos , Facebook ’s chief security military officer , defend his employer against “ coverage of our recent issues driven by stereotype of our employee and tone-beginning against fancy , strawman tech cos . ” in a protracted tweetstorm on Saturday .
Stamos was answer to Lawfare editor Quinta Jurecic , whocriticized Facebook ’s decisionto have human editorsoversee more adsas a bull - out , tell it should instead fix its disordered algorithms .
In his response , Stamos was particularly concern with what he see to it as attacks on Facebook for not doing enough to patrol rearing misinformation spreading on the platform , saying journalists mostly lowball the difficulty of permeate content for the site ’s billions of users and deride their employee as out - of - touch technical school bros . He add the ship’s company should not become a “ Ministry of Truth , ” a quotation to the totalitarian propaganda agency in George Orwell ’s 1984 .
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“ If your piece ties together bad guys abusing chopine , algorithms and the Manifestbro into one grand hypothesis of SV , then you might be biased , ” Stamos write . “ If your small-arm assumes that a problem has n’t been addressed because everybody at these companies is a nerd , you are wrong . ”
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“ If you call for less speech by the mass you dislike but also complain when the multitude you like are censored , be careful , ” he add together . “ … If you call for some type of speech to be controlled , then think recollective and difficult of how those rules / systems can be abused both here and afield . ”
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So that , apparently , is the eyeshot from the interior — that amid the worsening scandal over its sales oftargeted Facebook ad buysto organizations linked to the Russian government before the 2016 elections , some senior stave think the press are taking low blows over its thrifty attempts to walk the tightrope between a social media companionship and a substance supplier .
AsTechCrunch take down , one problem with this disputation is that Facebook employee are reluctant to mouth to the media , because the societal media giant “ will discharge employees that verbalise to the press without authorization . ”
But the meat of Stamos ’ tilt underplays the world that Facebook has becomeso immense and so powerfulthat management struggle to define exactly what it is and what it mean to accomplish — and that while the party face potential criticism if it overreaches in combating misinformation and misuse on the program , its current problems very much do relate to its predilection for the opposite , hands - off solutionswhich often boil down torelatively diminished tweaks .
Everyone suffer the moral hazard of Facebook - as - censor , has for year , and it ’s getting a little tiring hearing that repeatedly bring up as an self-justification when theneedle is currentlyvery far in the other direction .
Yet it ’s hard to take issue with Stamos ’ explanation of the difficultness of design an algorithm that attempt to take all of the likely progeny into report when pee a decision about what content to prioritise — bringing this back to the original point , human editor program . It ’s not a pig - out to bring in humans to help oversee Facebook ad sales or manually filter content ; some of the company ’s woes descend fromreplacing human editorswith supposedly less biased algorithms , as it did in 2016 , when it fired its entire news squad at the same meter its “ fake ” news program issue was exploding .
have ’s meet in the middle here : Put real effort into anticipating and anticipate problems with solutions that are n’t just clever technical workarounds , and perhaps that will make a minuscule dent in Facebook ’s mature repute as an aloof overseer of our digital lives .
[ TechCrunch ]
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