(2017-08-21) Instagram's CEO Wants To Clean Up The Internet but Is That A Gooding Idea

Instagram’s CEO Wants to Clean Up the Internet - But Is That a Good @&#$ing Idea?

Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, was at Disneyland last June when he decided the internet was a cesspool that he had to clean up. His company was hosting a private event at the park as part of VidCon 2016, an annual gathering that attracts social media virtuosos

the influencers were also upset. Insta­gram is supposed to be a place for self-expression and joy. Who wants to express themselves, though, if they’re going to be mocked, harassed, and shamed in the comments below a post?

He’s now a billionaire, but he doesn’t seem to play the alpha male games of his peers.

Systrom takes pride in this reputation for kindness and considers it a key part of Instagram’s DNA. When the service launched in 2010, he and Krieger deleted hateful comments themselves

So when Systrom returned from VidCon to Instagram’s headquarters, in Menlo Park, he told his colleagues that they had a new mission. Instagram was going to become a kind of social media utopia: the nicest darn place online

As the CEO of a service with 700 million users, Systrom recognizes that he’s something like the benevolent dictator of a country more than twice the size of the US

In October, the service launched a series of tools that roughly model what would happen if an empathetic high school guidance counselor hacked your phone

A cynic may note that these changes are as good for business as they are for the soul. Advertisers like spending money in places where people say positive things, and celebrities like places where they won’t be mocked. Teenagers will make their accounts public if they feel safe, and if their parents don’t tell them to get off their phones.

Instagram is a relatively small company. It has only about 500 employees

the team that has trained the machines to be kind is tiny too. When I visited in late June, there were about 20 people

Their job is to pore through comments and determine if each one complies with Instagram’s Community Guidelines, either specifically or, as a spokesperson for the company says, “in spirit.” The guidelines, which Instagram first drafted in 2012, serve as something like a constitution for the social media platform, and there’s a relatively simple 1,200-word version available to the public. (In short: Always be respectful and please keep your clothes on.) The raters, though, have access to a much longer, secret set of guidelines, and they use it to determine what’s naughty and what’s nice. There are dozens of raters, all of whom are at least bilingual. They have analyzed more than 2 million comments, and each comment has been rated at least twice.

Instagram has tuned the system so that it has a false-positive rate of 1 percent, meaning that 1 percent of the comments deleted by the machines will be ones the humans would have waved along.

One big risk for Instagram is that the filter will slowly change the tenor of the platform. Instagram is mostly pictures, of course, but what happens if genuine arguments and thoughtful criticism start to appear less frequently?

It’s possible that the world Systrom is trying to create may not just feel nice—it may feel sanitized. It may feel like, say, Disneyland.

The line of Censorship in Silicon Valley—what it is and what it isn’t—is a crooked one, or at least a blurry one.

Back then, calls for Free Speech came from people who wanted to bring down dictatorships. Now they seem to come from people demanding the right to say racist stuff without being called racist.

To Systrom, it’s pretty simple: Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to shitpost. His network isn’t a Public Square; it’s a platform people can choose to use or not.

Jackson Colaco makes the same point more sharply. “If toxicity on a platform gets so bad that people don’t even want to post a comment, they don’t even want to share an idea, you’ve actually threatened expression.”

How exactly do you know when restricting speech helps speech?

Tristan Harris spent several years working at Google, and he now runs a nonprofit called Time Well Spent, from which he has launched a battle against Social Media. His weapon of choice: long-form journalism.

Harris has partnered with an app called Moment, which measures the amount of time people spend in the other apps on their phones, and then asks them whether they’re pleased with that use

More than half of all users, though, express unhappiness with the time they spend on Instagram, which averages about 54 minutes a day. Facebook does even worse—it’s the app people feel the third worst about using, trailing only Grindr and Candy Crush Saga.

The two Stanford classmates fundamentally agree on one really important thing: The way people use technology can be quite unhealthy. Harris, though, wants companies to “stop hijacking people’s minds for the sake of engagement.” Systrom wants the engagement to include more sunshine.

Last June, around the time Systrom visited VidCon, Facebook announced that it had built a tool to help computers interpret language. The system, named DeepText, is based on a Machine Learning concept called word embeddings.

After learning about DeepText, Systrom realized that his engineers could train it to fight spam on Instagram.

Then Systrom had an even more complicated idea: What if Instagram could use DeepText to knock out mean comments? Forget about the succs and the follbacks. Could the AI learn to filter out more ambiguous content?

After launching the comment filter in late June, he got to work on a related task: elevating high-quality comments in users’ feeds

the company quietly launched the product last October

“Maybe trying sends a signal to other companies that this is a priority, and starts a national and international conversation that we should all be having about creating safe and inclusive online communities, not only for our kids but for our friends and our families,” he says. “I think that will be success.”