"I have long been opted out of search history or ad personalization on G/FB/AMZN/Twitter/Instagram/Verizon, and have repeatedly clicked "hide ad - irrelevant or not interested". "Why am I seeing this ad?" says "(wide age group) in your area", yet I've asked and my peers don't get ads like this."
I think this could actually explain your situation, if you give ad feedback like that too much you might run out of things for "the algorithm" to reasonably show you and you're getting fallen back to some sort of odd pool of low quality or new account test ads of some sort that are pre mainstream since you give feedback often or hitting some sort of weird bug after a point where it tries to find something to show you and then grabs for these weird ones somehow less shown and therefor less reported by other people?
I don't know the right answer, but I feel like something in this area could totally explain what you are experiencing. If you want to test the theory maybe make a new account on a service and don't give feedback on anything and see if you end up with mostly normal stuff?
This is the first I've heard of this new oversight board concept, who knows how this will go, but I think it's a really unique concept and let's give it a shot! If anything, it's just nice to see an innovative strategy applied to very big problem of today. I wish the best of luck to all of the members.
Having gone through the experiences you describe, your opinions match my own perfectly. I don't think most people that have not gone through it themselves will really understand the topic in this way. I know that you could have never convinced "prior experience me" of what I eventually found out along the way. I also highly don't recommend it. There are also dozens of exact relatable addictions that are represented in completely different ways such as coffee, social media and sugar by society. Not sure I get the newspaper headlines analogy though.
Just to clear up a specific point that I see a lot of people getting wrong here about the bonus stuff. I can at least say for the performance bonus it seems weird but thats how it works. Even though its money to reward your performance in “the past” so you’ve effectively “earned it”, if you quit like I did or get fired apparenty if it hasn’t hit the date that it gets paid to you yet you don’t get it. I think most people get surprised by this fact but since that specific situation is fairly rare I don’t think theres much effort to change the policy. I don’t even know what the policy really is, but just wanted to say that part at least of losing the entire performance bonus happened to me. But since I quit I think it’s more reasonable to lose it, that’s pretty lame to lose it when you’re fired since I had the time to factor that into my decision making knowing I would lose it where when you are fired and blindsided like that you are effectively losing a lot of money that you had already accounted for. I know corporations aren’t really dictated by emotion, but man it sure seems like there’s a lot of “bad luck” all at once here... that is really unfortunate. Maybe some rules could be changed to prevent certain things overlapping up like this. Getting fired is one thing, but getting fired and losing money you had already accounted for and technically “earned” is definitely putting you in an even harder spot. Really wish him the best. Also this isnt like tesla is going out of their way to screw this guy, these are just standard industry practices, but hearing situations like these definitely makes you wonder if they should be.
Also just to clear up some lingo for people that I still see people getting wrong:
Signing bonus
Cash sum you “recieve” for accepting the job.
Performance bonus
Cash sum you recieve several months after you’re latest performance review based on your “rating” for that half or year.
Equity (RSU) is seperate from both of these things but you can receive them in both situations. They then follow a vesting schedule that when you leave before the various vest dates its obvious that you wont receive the compensation.
While I completely agree that one size doesn’t fit all, you can’t deny facebook might run into some problems if the governments of each country they are working with aren’t exactly pushing for what facebook thinks are some of the most forward thinking morals like individual freedom of speech or lgbtq rights or gender equality. It puts you in a rough precedent and a likely banning from a country to start working with some governments on rules and not some with others. I think I agree with some of the aspects of your statement but there should be a larger body responsible for defining the base set of ethics for the digital world but on a global scale and something more like the geneva convention. I think its often unfair to all the people that work on these problems that truly care about finding solutions to imply that there is an easy alternative they are somehow incredulously ignoring.
I feel like you’re personifying “facebook” itself a bit as a sole entity when in reality its composed of thousands of individual people each with their own ethics and viewpoints so its not really like those are the same people working on privacy and suppressing hate speech, which I feel like would be somewhat of a necessity for your point. Really, everyone at that company is doing their individual best at their respective responsibilities to varying levels of success. But that really isn’t a coordinated calculated effort beyond what each person brings to the table.
“...the hubris of facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes?”
What about this is hubris? Wouldnt you argue they have a responsibility to try? Wouldnt it be hubris to build such a powerful platform and not think to care about minimizing the amount of damage malicious actors could do with it?
Seems like a pretty challenging task for anyone, also 1500 pages sounds like a good start, it would be nice if anyone who feels really strongly about the problems of this situation and wants to help out in a productive manner to read all of the pages and offer suggestions on how to improve it, maybe even upload some openly contributable global attempt at a “unified” (at least in distribution) agreed upon ethical core. Somewhat like the geneva convention did for conventional warfare, but for discourse through digital platforms different networks could adopt and reference.