Report on Meta Superintelligence

Max Kan, Julien Martin-Prin, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, and Dylan Patel, The Future of Meta Superintelligence: A 1 Year Progress Update, SemiAnalysis, Jul 09, 2026.

It’s been a little over 1 year since the disastrous Llama 4 release spurred Zuck to rebuild his entire AI org. Highlights include the shocking $14.3B Scale AI “investment” just to poach Alexandr Wang and the best people from his Safety, Evaluations, and Alignment Labs (SEAL) team, the multi-hundred million dollar (sometimes $1B+) pay packages offered to top AI researchers/engineers, and the expedited compute ramp enabled by their new “Tent” datacenter design. For more details, see our original post on MSL.

Since then, frontier AI has increasingly felt like a two horse race between OpenAI vs Anthropic. Google had a brief moment in the spotlight with Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana, but they’ve since faded dramatically. Despite their Windsurf acquisition, they’re far from a compelling agentic coding product, and 3.5 Flash is a benchmaxxed prop that performs far worse than GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 in real world scenarios (much less Fable and 5.6). 3.5 Pro is not even Opus level on coding. Microsoft has completely blown their early lead with GitHub copilot and failed to effectively leverage their access to OpenAI IP. SpaceXAI is selling $26B a year worth of GPUs to Anthropic/Google, and the Chinese labs are simply too compute poor to truly reach the frontier.

Meanwhile, MSL made their public debut this April with the launch of Muse Spark. You could argue this model represented a relative regression for Meta. Llama 3 70B and 3.1 405B were both SOTA open-source on release, whereas Muse Spark, despite also being closed source, lagged both DeepSeek v4 Pro and Kimi K2.6—open source models released around the same time—on most benchmarks.

[CHART GOES HERE IN THE ORIGINAL]

However, evaluating Muse Spark in isolation is missing the forest for the trees. What matters for MSL is the slope, not the intercept. Rebuilding your entire team from the ground up obviously comes with some short term setbacks, and it appears Meta has finally finished paying down this debt. Thus, the interesting question is not where MSL is today, but trying to predict where they’ll be in the next 6 months.

At the simplest level, there are three things you need to build a true frontier model: data, talent, and compute. We believe Meta is the only hyperscaler/neolab on track to be world class at all three and therefore has the best chance at catching up with Anthropic/OpenAI. We’ll explain why in full detail below, but as a teaser, here are the AI compute projections from our new Tokenomics Model.

[CHART GOES HERE IN THE ORIGINAL]

Lastly, behind the paywall, we’ll discuss what this all means for Google—the company most people today still believe rounds out the AI big 3.

Data is the new oil (for real this time)

We’ll start with data because it’s Meta’s newest advantage and probably the most underappreciated of the three.

In 2024, Ilya famously said that “data is the fossil fuel of AI.” While this analogy correctly highlights the importance of data for training AI models, it incorrectly assumes that the amount of good data is finite. In reality, if demand is strong enough, market forces will find a way.

There's much more at the link.

Clueless thy name is Zuckerberg

Victor Tangermann, Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues, Yahoo!Finance, June 16, 2026.

Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.

Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.

Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that's already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.

In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Zuckerberg attempted to lift their spirits in what appears to be a notable failure to read the room. Specifically, the billionaire promised to host a companywide AI hackathon in July — only to get brutally shut down by workers who were in no mood for such a thing.

Meta has regularly hosted hackathons in the past, but given last month's layoff announcement, the reception was extremely chilly. [...]

For all its employees' pain and suffering, Meta has surprisingly little to show. The company continues to trip over its own feet, struggling to release impressive new AI models as its competitors pull ahead further in the ongoing AI race.

Victor Tangermann, Meta’s Super Expensive New AI Team Is Already a Complete Catastrophe, Yahoo!Finance, June 15, 2026.

Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive "Superintelligence" unit.

But those who've survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren't exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta's 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.

Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta's AI models, is "soul-crushing." [...]

A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that's then fed to train AI.

Homo economicus on steroids.

Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

Mike Isaac, Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir, NYTimes, Mar. 12, 2025.

Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.

Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.

However:

The filing does not limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir, a spokeswoman for Macmillan said, adding that the company will continue to promote the book.

“We are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a nondisparagement clause in a severance agreement,” the spokeswoman, Marlena Bittner, said. “The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this.”

There's more at the link. 

As Beth Collier noted in a post to LinkedIn: “Will anyone be surprised that a company that started by ranking college women’s appearances may have had a toxic culture for women?”

See my post about the NYTimes review of the book.

Facebook is worse than I’d imagined

Jennifer Szalai, A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top, NYTimes, 3.10.25.

CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

The publisher of “Careless People” kept the existence of this memoir a secret until a few days ago — with good reason, it turns out.

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

And then it gets ugly. There's much more at the link.

Prospects for using LLMs in content moderation for social media

From the YouTube page:

Wherein I am joined by the estimable Dave Willner, who helped build the content moderation system at Meta, who talks me through how and why Facebook has squelched my open letter to former Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, and why my appeal has fallen into a black hole--and how his scheme of using large language models to scale content moderation might do a better job.

The first part of the discussion concerns Ben Wittes' case at Facebook. Willner discusses his work on using LLMs in contentent moderation starting at about 40:30. You might want to start there if you already know something about the content moderation process or have been through it yourself. You can always loop back to the beginning if you're interested.

In the current regime a bit of content may be flagged in response to a user complaint but more likely will be flagged an automatic classification system. If an item of yours is flagged it will be removed and you'll be notified of that and given some general reason, such as violating community standards. As to just which community standard or standards and how your item violates it, you'll be told nothing. You'll also be given an opportunity to appeal. That appeal is likely to be reviewed by a human, but who know if and when that will actually happen.

In an LLM-enhanced content moderation regime, the LLM will be able to provide information about the standards being violated and provide fairly specific reasons why a particular bit of content has been flagged. Moreover the user could enter into a dialog with the system. If that doesn't resolve the issue, then the case could be passed on to a human for review.

This strikes me as a significant opportunity to improve social media. And it seems plausible. Two posts I did back in December of 2022 illustrate the kind of reasoning that would be involved: Abstract concepts and metalingual definition: Does ChatGPT understand justice and charity? (Dec. 16, 2022) – which is included in a working paper: Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons, Version 2 (January 11, 2023), ChatGPT the legal beagle: Concepts, Citizens United, Constitutional Interpretation (December 27, 2022).

This video of moving about in the metaverse is not very compelling

The metaverse starts about 4:08. Of course, we've only got a 2-D view of the 3-D space the Zuckerberg and deGrasse Tyson are moving in (via Oculus headsets).

Sparkychan, Gojochan, the Metaverse, and Community on the Web @3QD

My latest 3QD piece is now up:

How me, 2 young girls, their father, and our imaginary friends discovered the Metaverse and thereby saved the world, a True Story

The piece is organized around some things I did on the web back in 2006 and 2007 and some other things I did back in the mid-1990s, soon after the web was born. All those things were fun. Mark Zuckerberg has changed the name of his company, to Meta, and has made the Metaverse the company goal. I’m skeptical that any Metaverse that comes out of that company will be half as fun as the events I report in this post.

Back in 2007 I made a bunch of posts to Mostly Harmless, all directed at two young Japanese-American girls. The last of them is a tale of adventure and mystery entitled, appropriately enough, Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre. That was a lot of fun. That’s the Metaverse part of the post. My contention is that nothing out of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) in the future is going to be as much fun as that.

Those particular events were preceded by some events and Michael Bérubé’s blog, American Air Space. It’s defunct, but you can find swathes of it on the Wayback Machine. In particular, you can find the Great Show Trial of 2006. That too was a lot of fun.

Neither the Show Trial nor the Sparkychan & Gojochan stories required the kind of elaborate, and now doubt expensive (and profitable) equipment that’s being dreamed up for the Metaverse. And yet somehow we managed to get along with one another – thank you very much – and have, you guessed it, fun.

Things were even more primitive back in 1995 when Bill Berry created Meanderings and then Gravity. Bill had to buy a server and code up the back end himself; he coded a discussion section as well. Everything was hand-coded in HTML. Talk about primitive! And yet we had fun and created a community. I’m still in touch with Bill and other folks I meet at Meanderings, and with folks I met and American Air Space and Mostly Harmless.

Those places worked because we wanted them to work. We had things we wanted to do. The web offered various tools. And so we figured out how to use those tools to do what we wanted to do.

Back in the mid-1990s things were wide-open and free. They were still that way in 2006-2007, though by then we did have advertising on the web. Big companies were trying to monetize the web. No problem.

But it’s not like it is now. Something happened between then and now. That something may have been good for business, but it’s not been so good for civility and civic culture. I have little reason to believe that, in their pursuit of the Metaverse and AGI (artificial general intelligence), FAANG will be much concerned about civic culture, unless regulators force them to act concerned. Why should they? They’re in it for the money.

Truth be told, I’m not quite that cynical. FAANG does consist of 100s of 1000s of human beings and they have their human concerns. But those concerns are being swamped by business concerns.

And so forth.

More later.

Facebook's Metaverse, Ho Hum, WTF!

From Ethan Zuckerman, Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago, The Atlantic, October 29, 2021:

The metaverse Zuckerberg shows off in his video doesn’t have to solve those problems. He’s promising future technologies that are five to 10 years off. But it still looks like junk. The fire in his fireplace is a roughly rendered glow. His superhero secret lair looks out over a paradise island that’s almost entirely static. There’s the nominal motion of waves, but none of the foliage moves. It’s tropical wallpaper pasted to virtual windows. The sun is setting behind Zuckerberg’s left shoulder, but he’s being lit from the right front. Even with a bajillion dollars to invest in a video to relaunch and rename his company, Zuckerberg’s team is showing just how difficult it is to create a visually believable virtual world.

But that’s not the problem with Zuckerberg’s metaverse. The problem is that it’s boring. The futures it imagines have been imagined a thousand times before, and usually better. Two old men chat over a chessboard, one in Barcelona, one in New York, much as they did on Minitel in the 1980s. There’s virtual Ping-Pong and surfing, you know, like on a Wii. You can watch David Attenborough nature documentaries, like you do on Netflix. You can videoconference with your workmates … you know, like you do every single day.

Zuckerberg isn’t building the metaverse because he has a remarkable new vision of how things could be. There’s not an original thought in his video, including the business model. Thirty-eight minutes in, Zuckerberg gets serious, talking about how humbling the past few years have been for him and his business. Remember, he’s not humbled by the problem of Russian disinformation, or the spread of anti-vax misinformation, or the challenge of how Instagram affects teen body image. No, he’s humbled by how hard it is to fight against Apple and Google. [...]

Facebook can claim originality in at least one thing. Its combination of scale and irresponsibility has unleashed a set of diverse and fascinating sociopolitical challenges that it will take lawmakers, scholars, and activists at least a generation to fix. If Facebook has learned anything from 17 years of avoiding mediating those conflicts, it’s not apparent from the vision for the metaverse, where the power of human connection is celebrated as uncritically as it was before Macedonian fake-news brokers worked to sway the 2016 election.

How will a company that can block only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content deal with dangerous speech when it’s worn on an avatar’s T-shirt or revealed at the end of a virtual fireworks display? Add monetization to the problems of content moderation—who gets to make money off a digital hate-speech T-shirt?—and Facebook’s oversight board is going to be very, very busy. [...]

The metaverse isn’t about building perfect virtual escape hatches—it’s about holding a mirror to our own broken, shared world. Facebook’s promised metaverse is about distracting us from the world it’s helped break.

Is Facebook’s Metaverse announcement a distraction from PR problems in its core social media domain?

Enquiring minds want to know.

No doubt you’ve heard the Facebook is going all-in on research toward the Metaverse. What is the Metaverse? It’s a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious high-tech whosiewhatsit where we can all work together in virtual harmony. It’ll be way cool. Super.

However, Tim de Chant at Ars Technica suggests “Facebook’s metaverse gambit is a distraction from its deep-seated problems,” July 28, 2021. It’s the timing:

It’s clear that Zuckerberg has been thinking about this metaverse idea for a while. But the timing of Facebook's announcement is interesting, to say the least. Facebook has “a history of doing these kinds of technical projects that look like they might be revolutionary at times when they’re being criticized for their lack of social responsibility,” Jen Goldbeck, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Maryland, told Ars. [...]

It's probably an overstatement to say that the metaverse news was released to serve as an intentional distraction from the company’s current problems. But the thought undoubtedly crossed someone’s mind at the company. There’s a “70 percent” chance that Facebook’s metaverse project is a “distraction from all the bad things that are going on,” Goldbeck said. “The last thing they want is more discussion of their algorithms and Q-Anon and extremist groups.”

As a distraction, the metaverse is almost too perfect. It’s a flashy news item that attempts to position Facebook and Zuckerberg as visionaries inventing the future. It’s also literally a way to escape reality. If Zuckerberg ever wanted a metaverse to escape to, where Facebook exerted influence over everything from physics to religion, that time is probably now.

Not meat and potatoes:

But in many ways, the metaverse project is a fundamental shift away from what made Facebook successful. First, Facebook is a company that tends to succeed when it iterates on existing ideas or solves genuine problems. Zuckerberg’s initial version of Facebook, called "Facemash," was a 2003 Harvard knockoff of another site called “Am I Hot or Not” that launched in 2000. Later Facebook iterations aped features from Friendster, MySpace, and others.

Even the company’s technological crown jewel, the News Feed, wasn’t created due to pie-in-the-sky dreaming about what could take social media to the next level. It was a solution to a real problem—as people added more friends on Facebook, they were getting inundated with updates. News Feed and its algorithms helped cut down on the chaos, prioritizing content that a user was more likely to engage with. Another Facebook hallmark—ads in the News Feed, the company’s current cash cow—was born out of its struggles to monetize users on mobile phones.

The metaverse also cuts against a key part of Facebook’s brand—allowing people to share their lives with friends and family. For many, the platform’s appeal comes from users' ability to like, comment on, and share content related to their real lives—not their virtual ones.

It feels a bit like what ethologists call vacuum activity. Wikipedia:

Vacuum activities (or vacuum behaviours) are innate, fixed action patterns (FAPs) of animal behaviour that are performed in the absence of a sign stimulus (releaser) that normally elicit them. This type of abnormal behaviour shows that a key stimulus is not always needed to produce an activity. Vacuum activities often take place when an animal is placed in captivity and is subjected to a lack of stimuli that would normally cause a FAP.

See also displacement activity:

Displacement activities occur when an animal experiences high motivation for two or more conflicting behaviours: the resulting displacement activity is usually unrelated to the competing motivations.

Alas, getting from those characterizations of Facebook’s behavior takes a bit more work than I want to undertake in a blog post. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The sad truth about social media

This is what I have been saying. All the cute and clever content moderation policies and fact-checking and media literacy efforts — none of it matters.

We built a system that amplifies torrents of garbage and rewards garbage slingers.

The problem with media is media. https://t.co/BREofGxlXR

— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN🗽🤘🏽 (@sivavaid) October 20, 2020

Facebook or Freedom, Part 6: Ideas on the table [so far]

This is mostly a book-keeping post to list the various ideas I’ve gathered on the problem of social media, with Facebook as my prime example.

What I’m seeing at the institutional level is: 1) break them up, 2) third party oversight of some kind, not government, but not directly tied to the for-profit platforms either, and 3) independent not-for-profit digital “public parks.” What if we link 2 and 3 somehow? Or are they too different for such a linkage to make much sense? In any event, they might be the beginnings of a new institutional sphere.

Note: This post does not, however, collect all my Facebook or social media posts.

Institutions

Digital public park

We need to create the digital equivalent of public parks. These would be free to all and perhaps funded through philanthropy (think of Andrew Carnegie). They would require careful tending.

What we need online is the electronic equivalent of a public park [digital public infrastructure]

Break them up (monopoly)

Asking/forcing the major platforms to police themselves will ultimately prove unworkable. It is more properly a function for the state; and it would also lock-in large size and create a barrier to entry as only large platforms can come up with the overhead revenue to do this.

Facebook or freedom, Part 4: Notes on Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

House recommends anti-trust action against tech giants

Oversight Board

We now have two oversight boards, one set up by Facebook, and the other set up independently of Facebook. Could these develop into a new kind of institutional actor, perhaps in concert with one or more digital public parks?

There is a third party board created to critique Facebook. What authority does it have, would it have, over FB? None that I can see.

Facebook critics form their own oversight board [Facebook objects]

Facebook has also established an oversight board, and set it up as a legally separate entity with a multi-million dollar endowment. What real authority does they have, would it have, over FB? None that I can see. Just moral suasion.

Facebook Oversight Board

Facebook announces new 'values'

Phenomenology of interface use

This is based on my own experience and notes how I’ve reacted differently to the forced change in the Facebook interface and the forced change in the Blogger interface. Two factors: 1) I use them in somewhat different ways; this is about technique. 2) I interact with people more of Facebook than on Blogger.

Facebook or freedom, Part 5: A different platform changes its interface, Blogger

Facebook or freedom, Part 3: The game goes on [Media Notes, special edition #1]

Facebook or freedom, Part 1: Who gave you permission to mess with my mind?

Users need to take more responsibility for the interface, and they need tools to do so.

We need decentralized social networks and AI tools to give users more control over them

Other things

There are places in the world where Facebook is essential internet technology.

Facebook or freedom, Part 2: Interlude, If I were Facebook, I’d be thinking…you will comply

There are other uses to which Facebook’s data can be put.

Measuring culture worldwide with a sample of two billion humans using data from Facebook

What we need online is the electronic equivalent of a public park [digital public infrastructure]

This is perhaps the most interesting thing I've read about the problem of the online environment and, in a way, it speaks to my sense that we need fundamentally new institutions: Eli Pariser, To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks, Wired, October 13, 2020.

Much of our communal life now unfolds in digital spaces that feel public but are not. When technologists refer to platforms like Facebook and Twitter as “walled gardens”—environments where the corporate owner has total control—they’re literally referring to those same private pleasure gardens that Whitman was reacting to. And while Facebook and Twitter may be open to all, as in those gardens, their owners determine the rules.

Venture-backed platforms make poor quasi-public spaces for three reasons.

First, as the legendary venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, “startups = growth.” The focus on growth—of users, of time spent, and then of revenue—is the defining trait that has made Facebook a $750 billion company. And the key to rapid growth is optimization to create a “frictionless” experience: The more relevant the content you see, the likelier you are to click, return to Facebook, and bring your friends.

But friction is essential to public space. Public spaces are so generative precisely because we run into people we’d normally avoid, encounter events we’d never expect, and have to negotiate with other groups that have their own needs. The social connections that run-ins create, social scientists tell us, are critical in binding communities together across lines of difference. Building a healthy community requires the careful generation of this thick web of social ties. Rapid growth can quickly overwhelm and destroy it—as anyone who has lived in a gentrifying neighborhood knows.

Second, “blitz-scaling”—explosive, aggressive growth—generally requires command-and-control leaders who make fast decisions. Once the territory is conquered, blitz-scaling commanders naturally become Boy Emperors with huge blind spots. [...]

The third and biggest problem with private ownership of quasi-public space is that public spaces require constant, active care and maintenance by skillful stewards. Scholars like Sarah Roberts have pointed out that the nuanced labor of governance and maintenance—finding the balance between welcoming everyone and providing safety and comfort for everyone—is critical to the health of online communities.

Any librarian can tell you that running a space that is truly welcoming to everyone is difficult and messy under the best of circumstances. [...]

But while this work is essential, it’s also both undervalued and costly. [...]

Alongside and between the digital corporate empires, we need what scholars like Ethan Zuckerman are calling “digital public infrastructure.” We need parks, libraries, and truly public squares on the internet.

Three problems: 1) money, "a guilty-but-loaded tech mogul ... the Andrew Carnegie of the 21st century", 2) "We need to rally a diverse, representative generation of builders to this cause," and three:

Finally, there’s a problem of public imagination. Fixing our ability to connect and build healthy communities at scale is arguably an Apollo mission for this generation—a decisive challenge that will determine whether our society progresses or falls back into conspiracy-driven tribalism. We need to summon the creative will worthy of a problem of this urgency and consequence.

Alas, I fear that may be a tough sell. The Apollo mission was conceptually simple; everyone could see the moon and everyone knew what planes and rockets were. It doesn't take much imagination to connect the two. The need for public online spaces is not so readily approachable, in part because people think we've already got them in Facebook and Twitter. Many know there are problems, but seeing these spaces as in fact being electronic walled gardens, that's tricky.

OTOH, perhaps my inherent revulsion at Facebook's forced interface change reflects the fact that I act like FB is a public space, open to me and my friends, and FB is saying, no, it's not public, it's ours and you are here on our sufferance. If so, then I take the relative lack of push-back against FB as an index that people don't realize FB is not public.

Facebook or freedom, Part 5: A different platform changes its interface, Blogger

Even as I’ve been playing at cat-and-mouse with Facebook, Google’s Blogger has changed its interface. From my point of view it’s pretty much of a wash, in some ways it’s a modest improvement, in other’s it’s not. And, come to think of it, in one way it’s rather more inconvenient, the HTML interface for entering posts. That has forced to me add a whole other process to preparing posts; it’s not a difficult process, just tedious.

And yet, here’s the point, I don’t find this change so offensive – and I do think that’s the proper word, “offensive” – as Facebook’s change. Both changes have been forced. And while Blogger did allow me to delay the change, it has offered so many delays as FB. Moreover, in some sense I am more ‘intertwined’ with Blogger than with FB. You would think that would make me more resistant to (forced) change, not less.

What’s going on?

I don’t really know. Here’s my current guess – and I’m making it up here and now.

It is because I use Blogger more actively than Facebook that I’m more tolerant of a change in the interface. Even the simplest blog post (e.g. a tweet or a photo or two) requires a number of explicit decisions which, in turn, require that I use different tools provided to me. I’ve got to:

1. switch to post mode,
2. create a new post,
3. select a title
4. place something into the appropriate field (HTML for a tweet, an image or images for a photo post)
5. select tags for the post, and finally
6. post it.

That’s not much, and it’s done quickly, but it’s more than I have to do for many FB tasks. But even posting photos to FB somehow seems simpler, though it can be rather ‘fidgety.’ However, as I’ve said, that’s for the simplest kind of post. Long-form written posts require a fair amount of text-wrangling, which is unlike anything I do with FB.

The upshot, it seems to me at this moment, is that I treat Blogger and its interface as something out there in the world. I use it often, it’s very important to me, but it’s a tool, NOT my mind. I’m willing to adapt to changes in tools.

FB seems more like an immediate extension of my mind.  Moreover, I have much more interaction with others on FB than I do on Blogger. Thus a forced change in the interface seems very invasive. So why isn’t every one else hollering at FB over this?

I note, however, that the switch is offensive enough that one Matt Kruse has created an extension that allows you to keep to the old interface.

Facebook or freedom, Part 4: Notes on Doctorow, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Cory Doctorow has recently published, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, August 26, 2020 (on Medium). He spends much of the first half of the book arguing that high-tech claims about the ability to leverage user-data for targeted advertising are exaggerated. The technologists have drunk their own Kool-Aid and keep grasping for more data because, well, they don’t know what else to do. I think he’s right. He also points out, however, that if these same capacities are put to political use to round-up and punish opponents, dissidents, and miscreants, they would wreak havoc.

I would also note that it seems to me that the whole world of personal computing and the web is oriented toward a pre-existing commercial culture of passive consumerism and THAT is the source of much of the difficulties.

Doctorow ends up arguing that the big companies need to be broken up.

Here are some specific passages from the last half of the book.

Dignity and Sanctuary

pp. 64-65

To grow, you need to be and expose your authentic self, and in that moment, you are vulnerable like a hermit crab scuttling from one shell to the next. The tender, unprotected tissues you expose in that moment are too delicate to reveal in the presence of another, even someone you trust as implicitly as a child trusts their parent.

In the digital age, our authentic selves are inextricably tied to our digital lives. Your search history is a running ledger of the questions you’ve pondered. Your location history is a record of the places you’ve sought out and the experiences you’ve had there. Your social graph reveals the different facets of your identity, the people you’ve connected with.

To be observed in these activities is to lose the sanctuary of your authentic self.

There’s another way in which surveillance capitalism robs us of our capacity to be our authentic selves: by making us anxious. Surveillance capitalism isn’t really a mind-control ray, but you don’t need a mind- control ray to make someone anxious.

Break them up

p. 84

Ultimately, we can try to fix Big Tech by making it responsible for bad acts by its users, or we can try to fix the internet by cutting Big Tech down to size. But we can’t do both. To replace today’s giant products with pluralistic protocols, we need to clear the legal thicket that prevents adversarial interoperability so that tomorrow’s nimble, personal, small- scale products can federate themselves with giants like Facebook, allowing the users who’ve left to continue to communicate with users who haven’t left yet, reaching tendrils over Facebook’s garden wall that Facebook’s trapped users can use to scale the walls and escape to the global, open web.

The problems of tight industries

pp. 85-86

Highly concentrated industries also present a regulatory conundrum. When an industry is dominated by just four or five companies, the only people who are likely to truly understand the industry’s practices are its veteran executives. This means that top regulators are often former execs of the companies they are supposed to be regulating. These turns in government are often tacitly understood to be leaves of absence from industry, with former employers welcoming their erstwhile watchdogs back into their executive ranks once their terms have expired.

All this is to say that the tight social bonds, small number of firms, and regulatory capture of concentrated industries give the companies that comprise them the power to dictate many, if not all, of the regulations that bind them.

This is increasingly obvious. Whether it’s payday lenders winning the right to practice predatory lending or Apple winning the right to decide who can fix your phone or Google and Facebook winning the right to breach your private data without suffering meaningful consequences or victories for pipeline companies or impunity for opioid manufacturers or massive tax subsidies for incredibly profitable dominant businesses, it’s increasingly apparent that many of our official, evidence-based truth- seeking processes are, in fact, auctions for sale to the highest bidder.

It’s really impossible to overstate what a terrifying prospect this is. We live in an incredibly high-tech society, and none of us could acquire the expertise to evaluate every technological proposition that stands between us and our untimely, horrible deaths.

Fake news

p. 88

Fake news — conspiracy theories, racist ideologies, scientific denialism — has always been with us. What’s changed today is not the mix of ideas in the public discourse but the popularity of the worst ideas in that mix. Conspiracy and denial have skyrocketed in lockstep with the growth of Big Inequality, which has also tracked the rise of Big Tech and Big Pharma and Big Wrestling and Big Car and Big Movie Theater and Big Everything Else.

No one can say for certain why this has happened, but the two dominant camps are idealism (the belief that the people who argue for these conspiracies have gotten better at explaining them, maybe with the help of machine-learning tools) or materialism (the ideas have become more attractive because of material conditions in the world).

p. 89

We have always had disagreements about what’s true, but today, we have a disagreement over how we know whether something is true. This is an epistemological crisis, not a crisis over belief. It’s a crisis over the credibility of our truth-seeking exercises, from scientific journals (in an era where the biggest journal publishers have been caught producing pay-to-play journals for junk science) to regulations (in an era where regulators are routinely cycling in and out of business) to education (in an era where universities are dependent on corporate donations to keep their lights on).

The value of online tools: coordination

pp. 90-92

But there’s one way in which I am a tech exceptionalist. I believe that online tools are the key to overcoming problems that are much more urgent than tech monopolization: climate change, inequality, misogyny, and discrimination on the basis of race, gender identity, and other factors. The internet is how we will recruit people to fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. Tech is not a substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or stability — but it’s a means to achieve these things.

The hard problem of our species is coordination. Everything from climate change to social change to running a business to making a family work can be viewed as a collective action problem.

The internet makes it easier than at any time before to find people who want to work on a project with you — hence the success of free and open-source software, crowdfunding, and racist terror groups — and easier than ever to coordinate the work you do. […]

The upshot of this is that our best hope of solving the big coordination problems — climate change, inequality, etc. — is with free, fair, and open tech. Our best hope of keeping tech free, fair, and open is to exercise caution in how we regulate tech and to attend closely to the ways in which interventions to solve one problem might create problems in other domains.

House recommends anti-trust action against tech giants

Cecilia Kang and David McCabe, House Lawmakers Condemn Big Tech’s ‘Monopoly Power’ and Urge Their Breakups, NYTimes, Oct 6, 2020:

“Our investigation leaves no doubt that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation and safeguards our democracy,” Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and chairman of the judiciary committee, and David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, said in a joint statement.

The House report is the most significant government effort to check the world’s largest tech companies since the government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations in the 1990s. It offers lawmakers a deeply researched road map for turning criticism of Silicon Valley’s influence into concrete actions.

The report is also expected to kick off other actions against the tech giants. The Justice Department has been working to file an antitrust complaint against Google, followed by separate suits against the search giant from state attorneys general. Antitrust investigations of Amazon, Apple and Facebook are also underway at the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and four dozen state attorneys general.

The two parties have their disagreements:

Democrats proposed legal changes that could substantially restructure Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. They said Congress should consider making it illegal for the tech giants to provide preferential treatment to their own products, as Google does in search results. They suggested breaking up the companies in “structural separations” and forbidding them from operating in similar businesses to those they were already dominant in. They also recommended adding to antitrust laws, including clearer rules that could block the tech giants’ attempts to buy other companies.

Some Republicans agreed with proposals to bolster funding for antitrust enforcement agencies, but balked at calls for Congress to intervene in restructuring the companies and their business models. Others have refused to endorse any of the Democrats’ findings.

Four gate-keeper giants:

The four companies, which have a combined market value of more than $5 trillion, largely operate in different digital businesses. But the report revealed monopoly abuses across them.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google had roles as “gatekeepers” in common and controlled prices and the distribution of goods and services, the report said. That made third-party businesses — like app developers on Apple’s App Store and sellers on Amazon’s marketplace — beholden to the companies’ demands, the report said. The word monopoly appeared in the report nearly 120 times.

Facebook:

Facebook’s monopoly power over social networking was also “firmly entrenched,” the report said. The company had taken steps, like acquiring new competitors or copying their features, to maintain that power, the lawmakers found. In particular, they said, after Facebook acquired the photo-sharing site Instagram in 2012, the social network’s executives had gone to great lengths to stop the service from overtaking its main product.

“It was collusion, but within an internal monopoly,” a former high-level Instagram employee told the committee during its investigation. “If you own two social media utilities, they should not be allowed to shore each other up. It’s unclear to me why this should not be illegal.”

A refutation of Facebook's claims on its behalf (contra The Social Dilemma)

1) Facebook builds its products to create value, not to be addictive. FALSE.
As @bengrosser's Facebook Demetricator shows the metrics Facebook developed such as the time/likes counter + the notifications in red are designed to encourage more engagement. https://t.co/HsWhKFzsAH

— ⚡️ Pinkeee 🎶 (@Elinor_Carmi) October 6, 2020

3) Facebook’s algorithm... keeps the platform relevant and useful. FALSE.
As I show in my research "People’s rhythms become a product that advertisers pay and bid for through Ad Auction to intervene in specific moments & shape people’s experience" https://t.co/KDqHlQPpwA

— ⚡️ Pinkeee 🎶 (@Elinor_Carmi) October 6, 2020

5) We take steps to reduce content that could drive polarization. FALSE.
Facebook reduced their content moderators during #Covid19 & replaced with AI which made things worse, this has been an ongoing problem on moderation as @ubiquity75 shows in her work https://t.co/ceHDEaro42

— ⚡️ Pinkeee 🎶 (@Elinor_Carmi) October 6, 2020

7) We fight fake news, misinformation, & harmful content. FALSE.
Facebook is in fact being sued by victims of Kenosha Protest violence for ‘Empowering’ militias.
+ Multiple advertisers boycotted the platform this year to stop funding hate. https://t.co/vPh3xFUFXJ

— ⚡️ Pinkeee 🎶 (@Elinor_Carmi) October 6, 2020

I examine many of these aspects in my new book where I have a whole chapter on how Facebook shapes what it means to be social AND anti-social. The chapter is called 'Engineering the Social' for a reason 😉... It's open-access as well 🙃https://t.co/VkDdHTQLnn

— ⚡️ Pinkeee 🎶 (@Elinor_Carmi) October 6, 2020

Facebook critics form their own oversight board [Facebook objects]

Olivia Solon, While Facebook works to create an oversight board, industry experts formed their own, NBC News, Sept. 25, 2020

Some of Facebook's most vocal critics are tired of waiting for its independent oversight board — so they're starting their own.

A group of about 25 experts from academia, civil rights, politics and journalism announced Friday that they have formed a group to analyze and critique Facebook's content moderation decisions, policies and other platform issues in the run-up to the presidential election and beyond.

The group, which calls itself the Real Facebook Oversight Board, plans to hold its first meeting via Facebook Live on Oct. 1. It will be hosted by Recode founder Kara Swisher, a New York Times contributing opinion writer.

Facebook is still working on creating its own oversight board, first described in April 2018 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an independent "Supreme Court" for content moderation decisions. Facebook's board won't launch in time to make any decisions during the presidential race. Its panel of 20 experts is scheduled to start reviewing cases in October, but it will have up to 90 days to make decisions.

The new board started by the critics is a project developed by The Citizens, a U.K.-based advocacy group founded by Guardian and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, whose March 2018 investigation into Facebook's data sharing practices made Cambridge Analytica a household name.

"This is an emergency response," Cadwalladr said. "We know there are going to be a series of incidents leading up to the election and beyond in which Facebook is crucial. This is a real-time response from an authoritative group of experts to counter the spin Facebook is putting out."

Who's on it?

The board is made up of about 25 experts, among them Shoshana Zuboff, author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"; Maria Ressa, a co-founder of the Filipino independent news site Rappler; Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights nonprofit Color of Change; Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; Reed Galen, a co-founder of the conservative anti-Trump super PAC The Lincoln Project; Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University; Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician who is international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center; Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia; Safiya Noble, an associate professor of information studies and African American studies at UCLA; Damian Collins, a member of the British Parliament; tech investor Roger McNamee, a frequent Facebook critic; and ex-CIA officer Yael Eisenstat, former head of election integrity operations for political ads at Facebook.

Guess what? Facebook isn't happy:

When the company learned of it, a representative tracked down the people who funded The Citizens at philanthropic investment firm Luminate, part of Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Group to express the company's disappointment, said two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private matters.

Those people said Brent Harris, Facebook's director of governance and global affairs, contacted three people involved in funding the project to tell them that they were undermining the company's own effort and playing into the hands of conservative critics of its planned board, including some people in Facebook's Washington, D.C., policy unit, who want to see the effort fail.

Posts on Facebook's oversight board:  Facebook announces new 'values', and Facebook Oversight Board.

The prodigal tech-bro in search of redemption

Maria Farrell, The Prodigal Techbro, The Conversationalist, march 5, 2020:

This could almost be a response to The Social Dilemma, and maybe it is, though it doesn't mention it.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,“(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

The rewards of privilege:

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

For some comments on The Social Dilemma, see this post: Facebook or freedom, Part 3: The game goes on [Media Notes, special edition #1].

What are the chances that Facebook will pull out of Europe?

Alex Hern, Facebook says it may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with US, The Guardian, Sept 22, 2020.

Facebook has warned that it may pull out of Europe if the Irish data protection commissioner enforces a ban on sharing data with the US, after a landmark ruling by the European court of justice found in July that there were insufficient safeguards against snooping by US intelligence agencies.

In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook’s associate general counsel wrote that enforcing the ban would leave the company unable to operate.

“In the event that [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users’ data to the US,” Yvonne Cunnane argued, “it is not clear … how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU.”

Facebook denied the filing was a threat, arguing in a statement that it was a simple reflection of reality. “Facebook is not threatening to withdraw from Europe,” a spokesperson said.

“Legal documents filed with the Irish high court set out the simple reality that Facebook, and many other businesses, organisations and services, rely on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate their services. A lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would damage the economy and hamper the growth of data-driven businesses in the EU, just as we seek a recovery from Covid-19.”

The filing is the latest volley in a legal battle that has lasted almost a decade. In 2011, Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, began filing privacy complaints with the Irish data protection commissioner, which regulates Facebook in the EU, about the social network’s practices.

Those complaints gathered momentum two years later, when the Guardian revealed the NSA’s Prism program, a vast surveillance operation involving direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet companies. Schrems filed a further privacy complaint, which was eventually referred to the European court of justice.

Is social media making a hash of our current institutions?