Really great article, and thanks for posting the text of it.
Facebook is weird for me because it triggers my FOMO, but then if I use it all I see are a ton of random things with the most toxic people in the world living in the comments.
And similarly I just realized why my friends on instagram use stories and not posts, because for the most part stories is the only place I see content from people I know anymore (and again the FOMO).
I really relate to the sentence at the end, “there are people there but they don’t know why and most of what they are seeing is scammy or weird.”
Really great article, and thanks for posting the text of it.
You're welcome. It was their daily free article to email subscribers. I can't afford to pay a subscription fee for full access but I find the combination of their mailing list + podcast is a good way to keep up to date with their investigations.
I left Facebook in 2014, having had to rejoin because in that era, you had to have an account to get a job. Which is another topic but worth keeping in mind.
If I don't know why I'm somewhere, I leave. Rave, website, bar ... these are all the same questions, just with less external pressure because you aren't the product in the other two situations.
I found this article quite interesting, as I deactivated my main Facebook account around the time the article asserts Facebook was still "trying" and only recently created a new account under a generic pseudonym to access all the community and small business information that is still locked entirely to the platform. Because I have basically nothing in my feed on this account, Facebook backfills it with "recommended" posts and I was pretty shocked at how universally terrible they are. I guess the algorithm uses my location and gender to generate these recommendations, since I've provided very little in the way of alternative information or interaction for it to use. As a result, my default feed is basically just a wall of misogynistic and highly sexualised slop and even the few genuine recommended posts (like backpackers looking for travelling buddies) are clearly being recommended because they feature young women with a bunch of older men thirsting over them in the comments.
Because I have basically nothing in my feed on this account, Facebook backfills it with "recommended" posts and I was pretty shocked at how universally terrible they are. [...] since I've provided very little in the way of alternative information or interaction for it to use
There is your problem.
When an information-hungry platform like Google or Meta asks you to fill out your preferences "to serve you more relevant content"... they are not lying. I mean, it's also to select ads that will pay more for your attention, but the thing with the content algorithm is, if you don't give it data, then it will ass-u-me that you're statistically most likely to engage with content that is getting most engaged... by people who have also not provided it any data.
The problem with that cohort, is it not only includes the few people with legitimate security concerns, but also those who got dark secrets to hide, and/or are using "incognito" browser mode to look for porn.
I don't like to give too much info about myself, but I also don't want to get stuff intended for the "average horny fanatics" group, so I try to give enough data for the algorithm to put me into a group that makes more sense to me.
And it works. The strongest signal you can send to the algorithm, is blocking content you don't want to see. It's amazing how quickly modern algorithms learn to avoid showing me most porn, politics, or religious content, and instead show me science and humor. They still send like 1% of trash my way, clearly checking whether I'll maybe engage with it, but report+block works wonders.
It's not a "problem", as such. As I said, I created the account to view the pages and groups of small businesses and organisations that have no other online presence. I don't use it for the doomscroll algorithm. This was just my observation of what kind of content is targeted towards males in my location by default.
But it's not exactly a "default", it's more of a "demographic with little data"... and I bet it's small enough that the algorithm is showing exactly the content most of its members are looking for. It's somewhat of a sad reflection on the state of privacy, when keeping things private becomes a segmenting parameter.
Interesting article, but in my experience it overstates the problem... at least for Facebook itself (I have zero interaction with Instagram, Threads, or VR).
I've gone back to Facebook for the last few months, and out of what it mentions, I've only seen like half of it, mostly in the comment sections.
Or to be more precise, for 2024 Q2, I'm seeing:
election disinformation - almost none
violent content
child sexual abuse material
hate speech - only in comments
fake news - almost none
crypto scams - a few
phishing - a few
hacking
romance scams - almost none
AI content - almost none
uncanny valley stuff
The article however forgot to include:
science deniers - a lot in open comments, very few in groups
religious zealots - in comments
political trolls - a few in comments
state-sponsored propagandists - a few in comments
general trolls - a few in comments
Still interesting how I get close to zero of these in my main feed.
there’s a level of disinvestment in Facebook
Disagree. Facebook has reached a "plateau of stability" where the current moderation tools keep enough people on the platform to make it profitable.
I've been actively reporting+blocking problematic content, and while about 99% of my reports end up in "no action was taken", it works wonders to keep my feed and group comments clean.
Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it's very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it's unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output
I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models' overfitting. I'm guessing it'll generate worse music, or they would've done so already.
Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.
Yeah. Imo their one hope was to make trackers that leverage both networks, as a sort of middle ground device for like a family with 1 android and 1 iPhone. Without that pivot they've seemed dead since the airtag launch.
That is a uniquely awesome hed. And only strengthens my belief that 404 Media is going to make corporate journalism wish that they'd not shit the bed to the extent that viable alternative options sprang up.
Reddit, and by extension, Lemmy, offers the ideal format for LLM datasets: human generated conversational comments, which, unlike traditional forums, are organized in a branched nested format and scored with votes in the same way that LLM reward models are built.
There is really no way of knowing, much less prevent public facing data from being scraped and used to build LLMs, but, let's do an thought experiment: what if, hypothetically speaking, there is some particularly individual who wanted to poison that dataset with shitposts in a way that is hard to detect or remove with any easily automate method, by camouflaging their own online presence within common human generated text data created during this time period, let's say, the internet marketing campaign of a major Hollywood blockbuster.
Since scrapers do not understand context, by creating shitposts in similar format to, let's say, the social media account of an A-list celebrity starring in this hypothetical film being promoted(ideally, it would be someone who no longer has a major social media presence to avoid shitpost data dilution), whenever an LLM aligned on a reward model built on said dataset is prompted for an impression of this celebrity, it's likely that shitposts in the same format would be generated instead, with no one being the wiser.
Lot of people not liking 404 Media, but this is the kind of reporting I want. Point out what's going wrong. Bring it to a conversation without a lot of skew. Fucking show the general reading audience how they are being fleeced by whomever. Didn't Vice do this at one point?
Maybe. All I know vice for is articles like "Whats the sexiest sex in the sexroom among sexy sexers" or aomething like that. So the average r/askreddit post
So if they were basically regurgitating Reddit already, does that mean they were using AI before it was cool? They might have just used the Amazon approach to AI (I.e., why use technology when we can throw a bunch of minimum workers at the problem).
The fun part is that the thing that causes Google to suggest adding glue to pizza was a genuine post about how they make the cheese stretching effect for advertisements.
So it wasn't even a shitpost, it was just the AI training missing some important context to the post.
My gf tried it. When I asked her how it was, she just said "mmm mmm mmm." At first I thought she liked it but then I realized it was just that her lips were stuck together.
About 20 years ago they shut down a Burger King in my city because people found out they were putting the dirty toilet seats and toilet brushes with the kitchenware in the dishwasher. Didn't help that their burgers looked more like actual poop than any other fast food place, became a local meme for a while.
We've had a McDonalds getting dragged over the coals this week for using the chip warmers to dry a dirty mop head. The McMop has been doing the meme rounds as a result.
I’d love if we learned god existed by right before everything went entirely off the edge for humanity, he pulls back a literal curtain in the sky and says, “you guys should see your faces right now! Hahaha! Classic. Anyway, that was fun. You guys are good, none of this happened, welcome back to the timeline where Reagan never got elected and everything is fine. [chuckles to himself as he retreats back behind the curtain] heh. Poop knife. Hilarious. Oooh, Yahweh, you are just too. Much.” [Carter frees the hostages, Reagan loses in a reverse of the blowout, the entire world heeds the warnings of climate scientists and the car that runs on water never gets buried]
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