Meta in Myanmar, Part IV: Only Connect

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previous: Meta in Myanmar, Part III: The Inside View

Notes

you don’t have to be online at all to experience the internet’s knock-on harms

A place like Myanmar is a wireless mulligan. A chance to get things right in a way that we couldn’t or can’t now in our incumbent-laden latticeworks back home.

It’s an act now, though, to be clear. They know. There are some good people working themselves to shreds at Meta, but the company’s still out doing PR tapdancing while people in Ethiopia and India and (still) Myanmar suffer.

although I think Meta’s been a disaster, I’m not confident that there are sustainable better places for the vast majority of people to go.

We don’t get a do-over planet. We won’t get a do-over network.

Modern adversaries are heavy on resources and time

about fake-Page networks on Facebook in 2019—they’re a genuinely global phenomenon, and they’re bigger, more powerful, and more diverse in both intent and tactics than most people suspect.

treat algorithmic virality like a nuclear power source: Maybe it’s good in some circumstances, but if we aren’t prepared to do industrial-grade harm-prevention work and not just halfhearted cleanup, we should not be fucking with it, at all.

authoritarian governments will corral their citizens on instances/servers that they control

Myanmar’s genocidal military turned out to be running many popular, innocuous-looking Facebook Pages (“Let’s Laugh Casually Together,” etc.)

content moderation at mass scale can’t be done well, full stop.

Content moderation that focuses only on messages or accounts, rather than the actors behind them, also comes up short.

disinformation campaigns demonstrate the “persistent” in “advanced persistent threat”: a single disinformation campaign, like China-based Spamouflage Dragon, can be responsible for tens or even hundreds of thousands of fake accounts per month

the unit economics of manipulation are skewed firmly in favor of bad actors, not defenders.

“Listening out” is from Ursula Le Guin, who said it in a 2015 interview with Choire Sicha that has never left my mind.

In Myanmar and in Sophie Zhang’s disclosures about the company’s refusal to prioritize the elimination of covert influence networks, Meta demonstrated not just an unwillingness to listen to warnings, but a powerful commitment to not permitting itself to understand or act on information about the dangers it was worsening around the world.

resource problem in open source and federated networks—most of the sector is critically underfunded and built on gift labor

most of the advantages of decentralized networks can be turned to adversaries’ advantage almost immediately.

being in charge of News Feed during a genocide the UN Human Rights Council linked to Facebook doesn’t seem to have slowed Mosseri down personally, either. He’s the guy in charge of Meta’s latest social platform, Threads, after all.

explaining why Threads refuses to allow users to search for potentially controversial topics, including the effects of an ongoing pandemic. This choice is being widely criticized as a failure to let people discuss important things. It feels to me like more of an admission that Meta doesn’t think it can do the work of content moderation

Back in post-coup Myanmar, hundreds of thousands of people are risking their lives resisting the junta’s brutal oppression. Mutual Aid Myanmar is supporting their work. James C. Scott (yes) is on their board.