Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, if we could just take that tangent. I’m having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg second time. Is there something you can comment on how to decrease toxicity on that particular platform, Facebook? You also have worked on creating a social network that is less toxic yourself, so can we just talk about the different ideas that these already big social network can do and what you have been trying to do? A piece of it is it’s hard. The problem with making a recommendation to Facebook is that I actually believe their business model makes it really hard for them, and I’m not anti-capitalism, I’m not, “Great. Somebody’s got business, they’re making money,” that’s not where I come from, but certain business models mean you are going to prioritize things that maybe aren’t longterm healthful, and so that’s a big piece of it. Certainly, for Facebook, you could say with vast resources, start to prioritize content that’s higher quality, that’s healing, that’s kind. Try not to prioritize content that seems to be just getting a rise out of people. Now, those are vague human descriptions, but I do believe good machine running algorithms, you can optimize in slightly different ways, but to do that, you may have to say, “Actually, we’re not necessarily going to increase page views to the maximum extent right now.” I’ve said this to people at Facebook. It’s like if your actions are convincing people that you’re breaking Western civilization, that’s a really bad for business in the long run. Certainly, these days, I’ll say, Twitter is the thing that’s on people’s minds as being more upsetting at the moment, but I think it’s true. One of the things that’s really interesting about Facebook compared to a lot of companies is that Mark has a pretty unprecedented amount of power. His ability to name members of the board, his control of the company is pretty hard to break even if financial results aren’t as good as they could be because he’s taken a step back from the perfect optimization to say, “Actually, for the longterm health in the next 50 years of this organization, we need to reign in some of the things that are working for us in making money because they’re actually giving us a bad reputation. ” One of the recommendations I would say is, and this is not to do with the algorithms and all that, but how about just a moratorium on all political advertising? I don’t think it’s their most profitable segment, but it’s given rise to a lot of deep, hard questions about dark money, about ads that are run by questionable people that push false narratives, or the classic kind of thing is you run… I saw a study about Brexit in the UK where people were talking about there were ads run to animal rights activists saying, “Finally, when we’re out from under Europe, the UK can pass proper animal rights legislation. We’re not constrained by the European process.” Similarly, for people who are advocates of fox hunting to say, “Finally, when we’re out of Europe, we can re-implement…” You’re telling people what they want to hear, and in some cases, it’s really hard for journalists to see that, so it used to be that for political advertising, you really needed to find some kind of mainstream narrative, and this is still true to an extent, mainstream narrative that 60% of people can say, “Oh, I can buy into that,” which meant it pushed you to the center. ded to find some kind of mainstream narrative, and this is still true to an extent, mainstream narrative that 60% of people can say, “Oh, I can buy into that,” which meant it pushed you to the center. It pushed you to try and find some nuance balance, but if your main method of recruiting people is a tiny little one-on-one conversation with them, because you’re able to target using targeted advertising, suddenly you don’t need consistent. You just need a really good targeting operation, really good Cambridge analytic style machine learning algorithm data to convince people. That just feels really problematic, so until they can think about how to solve that problem, I would just say, “You know what? It’s going to cost us X amount,” but it’s going to be worth it to kind of say, “You know what? We actually think our political advertising policy hasn’t really helped contribute to discourse and dialogue in finding reasoned middle ground and compromise solutions, so let’s just not do that for a while until we figure that out,” so that’s maybe a piece of advice.…

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