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What prompted me to write this was this article appearing in our feed.
https://qz.com/india/1434766/facebook-is-taking-down-anonymous-political-ads-in-india/
It explains that Save the Children India ad was taken down because it was political and it wasn’t clear who was paying for it. Here is the ad:
Just two things wrong with Facebook’s decision – the ad isn’t political and it clearly states who is sponsoring it.
The point here is that ‘Facebook’s decision’ isn’t made by a person. The is FAR too much data in FB to do that. A computer programme decides, and if you disagree with the decision – good luck, there is a FB complaints procedure, but you start at the back of the queue.
When we were planning to set up this site, we did consider using FB. It had some merit. It would have been easier, and might have been cheaper. It might have been better. But we would never have been truly in control.
My wife Sarah Bacon used to manage the Cricket Australia FB page. An amazing passionate community, hundreds of thousands of members from every cricket-country. During test matches, thousands of people would be on line chatting on a ball-by-ball basis. FB closed it down one day. No notification to Sarah, and she gave up the appeals process after about 6 months.
I actually don’t subscribe to the view that FB is inherently evil. It is what it is. FB has changed the world, the genie is out of the bottle, and it’s hard to see any future without social media. Maybe not FB of course.
But whoever supplies Social Media in the future will have to deal with so much data, key decisions will increasingly be made by computer artificial intelligence, and currently there doesn’t seem any viable financial model other than advertising (if you work out one, let me know and we’ll clean up!).
For all its many faults, I can’t see a future without all this. We have an island here of independence. We are in control of this tiny little island on the internet. But it is rather scary off shore.Maybe we should set up the CCMA campaign – ‘Campaign to Combat Misfiring Algorithms’… At the end of the day it’s people who write the code, and it’s a question of how much importance organisations like Facebook attach to getting it right. I don’t buy the argument that we are all doomed because computers are taking over the world – but we will be if we don’t insist on proper leadership and high standards. Just sayin’!
I think the change that is happening is the type of code people are writing. It is less and less old style al-Khwarizmi ‘if this, then that’ algorithms, which as you rightly say can be fairly easily quality controlled.
We are seeing more and more machine learning. So sure, ‘politics’ is defined initially with a series of synonyms and related words which it is easy to control, but then the programme itself looks at a few million posts, and says ‘in that case, i think these posts are political – do you agree?’. It will start fine tuning the word list; adding and subtracting words and phrases, but also looking at patterns of usage that it sees which we didn’t define. It will change its view over time based on changes in usage. The purpose isn’t to get to a formal definition of ‘politics’, but to get to the point where a machine would make an assessment that couldn’t be distinguished from that of a human. To do that, it has to have advanced syntactical analysis. Bad meaning good etc. How it actually assesses a single post then becomes incredibly complex – there isn’t a simple piece of code that you can QA traditionally.
Does FB care about this? The only thing FB cares about is shareholder value. If it impacts advertising revenue, it cares about it HUGELY. The good news is that advertisers want brilliant algorithms. Disney needs to know on a town by town basis how adverts for its new ‘princess’ movie are being received, so real time it can adjust stock holdings in stores. That a 13 year old kid might tweet ‘it’s really bad’, Disney needs to know how to count that tweet accurately. And of course, a 13 year old tweeting that is highly likely to have a different meeting than a 63 year old tweeting the exact same words.
I don’t think we are doomed at all, but I do think control over data is changing. Leadership and high standards don’t change of course, but the ability of leadership to control standards is getting more and more complex. (And al-Khwarizmi is of course one of my heroes!)
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