Facebook Misinformation As A System

By Leo Gura - January 17, 2022

This is an amazing interview with a former high level executive of Facebook’s security team. It offers a nuanced behind-the-scenes look at the complexities of managing misinformation. It also offers important lessons in systems thinking.

I want you to notice several key points while watching:

Notice the depth of complexity to this problem. There are no easy solutions. Notice that it’s never as simple as “Facebook bad”, “Facebook biased”, “Mark Zuckerberg bad”, etc.
Notice that all the actors are acting from good intentions, trying to do their best.
Notice that no one is in control. Systems of such massive complexity are outside of anyone’s control, even the CEO or the world’s richest people.
Notice the two-way causal connections between giant corporations and governments. Is the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog?
Notice that this thing we call “Facebook” is a sub-system of the larger system we call society, and that all of it is rapidly evolving and actively surviving. Notice how powerful collective survival is. Facebook is struggling to survive, governments are struggling to survive, political parties are struggling to survive, individual political leaders are struggling to survive, businesses and advertisers are struggling to survive — and all of these threads of survival are entangled in what we might call a survival tapestry.
Notice how difficult of a job it is to run and/or to fix a system like Facebook. Imagine yourself as the CEO and notice how difficult your life would be, how much sleep you would lose over all this, how much you would struggle to make the right decisions, how much your integrity would be tested, and how often you would be criticized by both insiders and outsiders no matter what decisions you made.
Notice how much wisdom, intelligence, integrity, consciousness, love, and selflessness would be necessary to properly oversee a system like Facebook and to keep it from falling into devilry.
Notice how profoundly epistemology shapes society, human behavior, and survival. Notice that this whole issue of “misinformation” is really a subset of epistemological problem: How do we know what is true? Who gets to decide what is true? Which perspectives are more valid than others? How do we avoid bias and self-deception? How do we avoid the spread of falsehood and corruption? Notice how an abstract field like epistemology gets cached out in the real world. In other words, when you interact with a social media platform like Facebook you don’t think to yourself, “Ah, yes, this whole system is built on a series of complex epistemic issues.” No. To you Facebook presents itself as just a place to talk to friends. It isn’t obvious that Facebook shapes your perception of reality or that epistemology at play.
Notice how this whole issue of misinformation is an example of the broader concept of devilry which I’ve talked about. Notice how the problem really boils down to: How do you stop devilry from spreading and overtaking truth/goodness/love?
Notice how the complexity of these Facebook problems can be extrapolated to other large systems within society such as governments, corporations, academia, science as an institution, the education system, medicine, the food industry, the entire economy, the military, capitalism, socialism, political parties, geo-political rivalries, non-profits, etc. If running Facebook is so hard, consider how hard it is to run all the above in a non-devilish manner. Notice that even if you ran these systems with the best of intentions you would still fall way short. Can you see how you have underestimated the depth of the Facebook problem? Now try to extrapolate your error to all those others systems, which you have also been underestimating. This should leave you with a humility with respect to criticizing and judging complex systems which you barely have behind-the-scenes experience of. Notice that how a system looks from the outside is not at all how it works from the inside.

These are some profound lessons in systems thinking, all from one interview.

And lastly, I want you to notice how many high-level lessons can be contained in a single interview when you know what to listen for and when you have a deep background in the kind of theoretical work we do on Actualized.org. This is a meta-lesson. Notice how much deeper your understanding of this interview is if you have done the work of internalizing some of the foundational concepts I talk about in my “foundational” episodes. This is the power of our work: your understanding of things becomes so much richer and more nuanced.

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