(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


NEW: Interview with @RachelAxon at USA Today, re: #Disinformation propagating virally on #Facebook, and #FrancesHaugen

2021-12-28 19:19:21+00:00

Back in mid-November I received this query from Rachel Axon at USA Today, regarding a Frances Haugen-sourced story that they were preparing which sought to paint viral speech as a danger to the public. The story has been published today, and (in short) I strongly reject the proposition that virality of speech is somehow innately bad.

I increasingly suspect that the primary difference between mine and Frances’ viewpoints, is that my job as an engineer — fortunately supported by my perspectives on humanity — was and is to enable more people to talk with each other, as securely and privately as they deem necessary, and with reasonable reporting mechanisms to prevent abuse.

Frances’ role as a product manager? To look for “harms” amongst populations and to see communication amongst those populations as “the problem”, rather than (e.g.) abuse, hatred or prejudice. This was, is, and remains a very different perspective and goal from mine.

Part 1

Hello Alec,



I hope this note finds you well. I am reaching out because I was hoping to speak with you about Facebook. As I’m sure you’re aware, your badge post was included among the documents collected by Frances Haugen, and something you wrote stuck out to me as being potentially relevant to a story I am reporting.



You wrote, “I am leaving because I am highly concerned about our corporate direction, how our pursuit of growth may negatively impact our ethics and mission statement, and how this has become manifest in our codebase.”



I am reporting about the problems Facebook identified with reshares – namely that they are more likely to contain misinformation the farther they get from the original poster – and the proposals it came up with to combat this problem but didn’t roll out widely. I know this was not your area at Facebook, but the documents seem to indicate the issues you raised might be at play.



I’d appreciate any time you might have for a call, so please let me know if that would be possible. Thank you.

Hey Rachel,

Thanks for reaching out.

I’m wondering if you’ve read my blog post re: my interview with Steven Levy? Link for context: https://alecmuffett.com/article/14994 — and I have further posted a copy of my “Goodbye” posting, together with my rationale for my posting it now, at: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15058

On The Record: my 30+ years of experience of security & privacy engineering, 25+ years of civil society activism to improve people’s access to free and private communication, and fully 20 years of working for Silicon Valley tech corporations in many roles, all lead me to believe that (most of? all of?) the “alternatives” which Frances proposes for structuring social networking in order to limit people’s ability to communicate, are irredeemably illiberal, unwise, and prone to unforeseen negative consequences – not even to mention “commercially unviable”.

I literally quit my job at Facebook Engineering because they were proposing to enable Chinese state agencies to selectively “downrank” viral content in feeds — and also: report authors to the authorities — in pursuit of entering the Chinese market. You may recognise the same architecture at play with “fact checking”, about which I am similarly dubious but less unhappy because the result is generally annotation rather than suppression of content, and jailing/vanishing of the authors is unlikely.

So I am deeply unhappy with proposals to artificially classify, downrank, or limit propagation of content purely because it is “viral”, and I am incandescently unhappy at discourse that Frances has inspired which suggests that people’s conversations ought and must be policed for the public good:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/24/facebook-whistleblower-warns-dangerous-encryption-will-aid-espionage/

…a position that she herself has walked back from, but only instead to spread baseless fear, uncertainty and doubt:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/25/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-raises-trust-and-security-questions-over-its-e2e-encryption/

“need public oversight of anything Facebook does around end-to-end encryption” — um, no, no we don’t, and I have written an entire article about that, here: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15121

Regards her proposals, e.g.:

here is a short thread on how “chronological” feeds will simply lead to an uptick in retweeting in order to garner attention, and thereby pollute the public discourse, increase noise, and dilute the value of social networks like Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1451990786686570508;

here is a diverse thread about the benefits of “virality” and whether we would all (e.g.) globally be aware of US police brutality, in absence of feed ranking: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1454131456461185029

Everyone will lose from these proposals, and few will benefit in any concrete manner; in fact this is my overall perspective towards Frances’ campaign, and I strongly disagree with her proposals for changing privacy, user-safety, and user-experience, and likewise her approach towards causing change.

We attempt to quench or limit burgeoning abilities to mass-communicate, at risk to ourselves which equal or exceed the risk caused by that communication.

Not to mention that she also — I believe naively — plays squarely into the hands of those people who would most benefit by filtering, shaping, and censoring public discourse.

— Alec Muffett

ps: I shall be posting this text as a blogpost; my question to you is whether you would like to be attributed with/without quotation as instigator of the posting, and if you would like a grace period to permit you to publish first?

Part 2

Good Morning Rachel!

Thank you for your response! I will swap tactics and go through this incrementally.



On Wed, 17 Nov 2021 at 00:50, Axon, Rachel <[email protected]> wrote:



Alec,



Thank you for a prompt and thorough response. I have read through each of the links you sent and think I better understand your position generally. As it relates to what I am currently reporting, this part stood out to me: “So I am deeply unhappy with proposals to artificially classify, downrank, or limit propagation of content purely because it is ‘viral.’”

Yes.

The documents about reshares (especially deep reshares of 2+, which Jeff Horwitz references in one of the tweets you sent) show a couple key things: that Facebook knows they are especially at risk of spreading misinformation

Aside: “especially at risk” — well, yes, but that’s not saying much; It’s a consequence of being a primary form of communication in the modern era. It’s not like misinformation is being significantly shared by carrier pigeon or vellum scroll nowadays, although as recently as 1998 there were race riots in India sparked by pamphleteering: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452702989710413837

This is a point that I have also made to other critics of Facebook —https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1452915519816884225 — should we treat people like animals in a wilderness preserve where they can continue to live in their “natural state” of disconnectedness; or like the rest of the world [should we] enable them with connectivity and expect [to see] disruptive adaptation?

I would no more leave people without communication “for their own good” than I would abandon them without medical supplies if they lacked such. And who am I, who is anyone, to say that a people have “too much communications capability” available to them?

and that several options have been considered to combat that. Those include demoting reshares where the users is not a friend or follower of the original poster (it tried these dampening measures, at least for a time, in a small handful of countries), reducing distribution of pages relying on manufactured virality, putting a speed limit on depth 2+ VPV reshares in users’ feeds if they were traveling faster than 85% of similar content and adding reshare friction, among others.

Yes. See also “everyone in the world is prevented from forwarding baby pictures to more than five friends at a time, and perhaps with consequent forwarding limits to other family members, because every baby in the world is a potential terrorist, rioter, or corrupt political campaigner attempting to influence an election.”

I’d be very interested in your perspective on proposals like those from within Facebook and what is appropriate to use in a case like deep reshares and the misinformation problems they present.

So there’s this interview with Frances in Vogue — https://www.vogue.com/article/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-interview — where she describes herself as a “Eisenhower Republican”. You’ll have to tell me whether that means she’s supposed to be in favour of maximising people’s potentials and liberties.

Me? I am a liberal humanist and free-speech advocate in the wishy-washy British tradition — I can expand on that if you want, but basically: I’m an optimist about humanity, I believe that most people are mostly good, and I believe that we should seek to minimise people’s intention to cause harm via social means such as “education” and “care” rather than prescriptive means such as “surveillance” and “censorship”.

Of course if actual user accounts demonstrate bad behaviours — or are credibly reported for the same — then they should totally be taken down. Speech has consequences, and laws against abuse exist; and it would be good for platforms in general to make such reporting easy and frictionless.

But I believe that prescriptive oversight of people leads to bad consequences: both socially as it drives the bad stuff underground where it festers, and also technically as we move at speed towards an end-to-end encrypted world where we would block “activity” or “events” rather than “content”.

Re: the latter, I worked at Facebook for more than 3 years, and I saw alarms go off when Brazil scored a goal the year they were hosting the {Football/Soccer} World cup. It was hilarious, but I wondered what would happen to the collective joy of Brazil if that moment were quenched by some automated harm-prevention software which saw that event and decided to throw the country into a “digital lockdown”.

The question I usually face at this point is something like “But Alec, isn’t this the right thing to do? Isn’t it good and proportionate to prevent harm, and isn’t it okay for everyone to occasionally deal with such trivial side-effects?”

And my answer is: I don’t think it is. Everyone is talking about “harms”, but nobody is valuing the “benefits” of free viral expression, and hardly anyone is discussing the “emergent potentials” of such capability.

We use the Internet for so many things which back in 1988 (I was there) we would never have conceived. We use it to “keep in touch” so easily, even ambiently, with voice and video, over enormous distance, to fill personal needs. The people of entire nations can go into high alert when disaster or drama strikes — again, 2015: a Russian jet is shot down by the Turks over Syria, and Facebook dashboards light up with surprise spikes of activity. Neither Turks nor Russians much trust their local/state news sources — but should Facebook or any other platform consequently take steps to also ensure that those peoples can’t share messages amongst themselves at speed, in case it happens to be “misinformation”? Should Facebook effectively support their governments?

Viral speech is a powerful phenomenon, and it constitutes the online form of “freedom of assembly”. People are learning to adapt to modern forms of it. I am deeply concerned at any proposal that virality should be throttled or intermediated by authorities, or by platforms on behalf of authorities.

And I believe that the online world in 2050 will be amazing, if we don’t censor it into nonexistence beforehand.

If there is a time we can connect to discuss, I’d really appreciate it and do my best to accommodate your schedule.

I’m parenting a 5mo baby at the moment, so email is best. Sleep is rare, interrupts are legion, and I am reassured by having the time to run a spellcheck. 🙂

Regarding your blog post, I certainly understand you sharing your thoughts but would appreciate a grace period to publish our story first.

Fine by me. Please let me know your progress.

— alec

Footnotes & Links
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15467
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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