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What's the expected fix here? I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists. The way I see it, these are the ways you can ha
by RickS 8y ago
What's the expected fix here?
I was unfamiliar with the bands and most of the people in those targeting lists.
The way I see it, these are the ways you can handle this:
1) Facebook builds this data the hard way. They staff a team of experts on "undesirables", who research and implement custom blocklists at facebook's scale. Insanely cash and time intensive, to say nothing of the "who decides what's undesirable" problem.
2) Spread cost and effort by amassing a central repository of known baddies, and all the orgs contribute and share access. The government does something like this with hashes of sex trafficking imagery, so that eng teams can filter against a blacklist. I think this topic FAR more nuanced and less binary than "does this picture contain illegal pornography or nah". Who maintains this list of undesirables? You're at "social credit score" in a hurry.
3) Algos. You let software extrapolate commonalities from known-bad actors – school shooters, confirmed russian propaganda branches, etc. And let the machine learn their language and flag accordingly. This is going to be coarse and stupid in the way ML always is, and local business owners with names like Heinrich are gonna get their livelihoods smashed accidentally here and there. Not great.
4) What Simulacra said – you just turn the whole targeting infra off. Facebook stops making money. This is great, I'd love to see it as regulation, but it's a big stretch, and very lofty when phrased like this.
5) Some kind of adtech equivalent of finance's KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation. Tie ad buys to confirmable, prosecutable identities, and rather than filtering before launch, aggressively follow up after launch. You run an ad campaign for nazis? Cool, your LLC and its primary stakeholders are permabanned. Facebook has already tried light versions of this, but it was lip service.
IMO 4 and 5 are the places to spend effort. I think we nee to start having conversations that do away with the idea that humans are autonomous and impervious to influence, and start having the discussion in a new context: When and how are you allowed to manipulate the minds of citizens at scale, and what kind of paper trail does it leave?
- pbreit 8y agoI don't understand why we don't let such platforms adopt a more laissez faire approach to such situations. There's an inordinate amount of pressure to curb free speech these days which seems very un-American.
- munk-a 8y agoI was in this camp for a while but the current political reality has shifted me towards viewing the normalization and acceptance of such hate speech as a negative to society. When I was growing up nazis and white supremacy were always framed in a negative light to make it clear they were wrong (this is mostly relevant in the developing years, less than 14 or so where children don't have a developed moral compass) now a days the extreme right is being treated as just another opinion you can have, normal adults recognize the danger associated with unrestrained nationalism and hate speech but young people are unexposed or unfamiliar with what it can lead to. This stuff is dangerous, it can warp the way you view the world, any information glorifying it should always be accompanied with explanations and warnings as to the hate it is imbued with... It is un-American to hate another person because of their origin or their religion, it's also un-American to squash an open discussion on that topic but... that discussion needs to happen between mature adults in a setting that makes it clear how unacceptable it is to lean on racist tropes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- eponeponepon 8y agoCan we be clear on this, please? It's inhuman to hate another for their origin or religion - not just un-American. This problem isn't about whether or not you're a good American, it's about whether or not you're a good human.
- munk-a 8y agoI absolutely agree with this while acknowledging that in some circles being inhuman carries less weight than being un-American. I'm currently in Canada anyways[1] so... good luck down there folks! [1] Expat, still a US citizen.
- dmurray 8y agoHating people from outside your tribe is as human as any behaviour gets. It's a behaviour we have to work so hard to suppress precisely because it's so natural.
- pdpi 8y agoI'd argue the rule should simply be that, the moment money changes hands, you can either tell me who paid you for a service, or you're legally liable for performing that service yourself. KYC for ads would then just be a natural consequence of this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 8y agoI would expect some combination of (1) and (3). Facebook already necessarily employ a small army of moderators to remove illegal and "undesirable" material; they must have supervisors who set the overall policy direction and deal with new, emergent problems. Companies that use social media on a large scale, and those companies that run social networks disguised as videogames, employ "community managers", whose job it is to understand and communicate with the community, including keeping abreast of disruptions. It doesn't seem that Facebook itself has many of these. Facebook should get itself some "machine anthropologists", to study the ant farm. They can then get a sense of these problems before they get in the press, and definitely before they get to the Parliamentary committees. And feed the existing algorithms.
- RickS 8y ago> Facebook should get itself some "machine anthropologists", to study the ant farm. This is such a cool job title, I love it. I've long dreamed of doing this job at Twitter. There are so many blatantly patterned spam attempts and whatnot. I would love to work on analyzing, for example, the patterns in follower graphs surrounding templated bitcoin scam tweets.
- pantaloons 8y agoThe only viable solution is #4. So long as Facebook can make money by targeting specific groups or behavioral features, their algorithms and advertisers will find facsimiles for protected groups, the vulnerable, children, or Nazis since this optimizes revenue and engagement in dramatic ways. Even the most well-intentioned actor -- and Facebook is very far from that -- could not win this self-imposed game a whack-a-mole. One alternative to shutting off targeting altogether would be switching from a blacklist to a whitelist approach, where regulators provide the set of features or groups that are allowed to be targeted.
- toss1 8y ago...6) Full transparency at scale. When someone buys an advert in a newspaper or TV broadcast, it is visible to anyone watching. In contrast, thousands of adverts can run in FB environment without anyone but the target able to see -- completely under the radar. Starting with #5 KYC, and adding a site where EVERY advert of every type is available for public inspection, along with its (verified) originator info and targeting parameters. This would allow all kinds of scrutiny by journalistic and public interest groups (e.g., researchers tracking hate groups, etc.). FB Is making a bit of a start at this publishing some ads, but until they get to the full transparency, it can't be trusted. The full transparency would also be a huge benefit to researchers. I'd also be happy to see it required as a regulation for all players, not only FB.