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I haven't actually seen the video in question, but on a general level I'm confused why everyone is so up in arms here. Do we really want Facebook to be even mo

I haven't actually seen the video in question, but on a general level I'm confused why everyone is so up in arms here. Do we really want Facebook to be even more aggressive in censorship of its content? Do we want them to use realtime ML to automatically determine if a livestreem video is bad? [1] They removed the video promptly after receiving reports about it. They also proactively block people from uploading copies. What more do we want? Maybe we are misdirecting our anger about the violence? [1] "Bad" is a very loose term that changes over time. When advocating for this kind of tech and strict content rules, we are also codifying a set of moral standards to define "bad", so we should tread carefully. Not everything is as clearcut bad as this video, and it's not a huge jump to apply this to other "objectionable" media, which is not the world I want to be pushing for.

quink 8y ago
Yes, yes, ban more groups (including flat earth, climate denial and anti-vaxxers) while also killing the filter bubbles and no. These questions aren’t as hard as you think.
- secfirstmd 8y ago
  Well they get harder when certain governments abuse that power to stifle legitimate activists and journalists though: https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/fac...
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Where do you stop? Who decides what is banned? That seems like a hard question.
  - sampo 8y ago
    For example, there is an equally strong scientific consensus that GMO crops (and food) are safe, as there is about climate change being real. But there are lots of users right here in HN who would get upset if their anti-GMO opinions were banned the same as climate change denial and anti-vaxxer opinions.
- buboard 8y ago
  fine, but wouldn't you rather have all the idiots in a single walled garden? If they get out of there, it will be for a distributed platform from which nobody will be able to remove anything.
  - quink 8y ago
    Not really, there’s a new particularly vicious strand of radicalisation on the Internet and having the ability to make those hosting the content traceable and responsible through a fracturing of the community would be a boon, and that’s not really been happening with Facebook. And I don’t think distributed or decentralised platforms aren’t even close to the alternative you think they are.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "These questions aren’t as hard as you think." Yes, just let's block whatever you don't like. What could go wrong?
  - quink 8y ago
    That’s just coincidental, it’s just that what I don’t like and complete disagreement with scientific consensus or harming people overlap.
    - eitland 8y ago
      Go 200, 300 or 400 year back. Imagine a person like yourself, mainstream opinions, politically correct. We now know he would be wrong on a number of things. I mostly agree with you on a case-by-case basis it seems, but a little humility might be good.
      - bryan_w 8y ago
        You don't even have to go that far back. Just 20 years ago the idea that being gay was ok would get you treated like an anti-vaxer today. Go back 50 years and "race mixing" was taboo.
        quink 8y ago
        There was no broad scientific consensus about how being gay is bad 20 years ago. Banning from one particular private platform is fine, if people want to be anti-vaccination don't do it there, maybe it'll actually encourage them to stop wasting time on Facebook and contributing to the actual science.
      - quink 8y ago
        Scientific consensus didn't exist in anything like its current form 200, 300 or 400 years ago.
- austhrow743 8y ago
  They're going to take their discourse elsewhere. Best to just skip the whack a mole and put them in camps.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Because of course, we all know that any regulation is part of an inevitable slide to “camps”. Come on, people who argue that always seem to miss just how much power a society has to change course, which is why that slippery slope is a fallacy and not predestination. I’m not hearing people opine that “today they came for the child abusers, tomorrow the Jews.” It’s a ridiculous premise, and it both oversells the threat of any action they’re ideologically opposed to, and undersells the power we all have to either promote or fight fascism.
  - quink 8y ago
    Sure they will. I'm perfectly fine with the whack-a-mole but detain anyone who's a credible threat to the physical safety of others. I'm talking about limiting the freedom of anyone in theory talking about subjects in a way that results in physical violence or substantially harms society to the point of losing a substantial number of lives on one single private platform in large groups. I'm not talking about death camps, but the distinction seems to be lost on the crowd flitting down the slippery slope.
panarky 8y ago
Facebook built a monster it cannot control. Their monster is out of the cage and it's making frightening changes to society, rapidly and globally. I have an extremely strong bias in favor of free expression, but Facebook altered the playing field. Do we really want ISIS beheading videos and terrorist recruitment to circulate freely, amplified and accelerated by Facebook's social graph? [0] Do we really want disinformation fanned out instantly to friends of friends that incites mob violence? [1] No, I don't want to live in a world where a faceless ML automatically censors everything I do. But if that's the only way to control the monster Facebook created, then maybe it's better to switch off the monster entirely. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-moderator-guidelines-extreme-content-analysis https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-modera... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-remove-misinformation-that-leads-to-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-re...
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  I sometimes wonder if people asked the same questions when postal services and telephones were invented. People are writing letters to each other and conspiring about things, and no one can even track it! People are calling each other on the telephone and plotting crimes with no one the wiser! I suppose in at least one way they did, because mail fraud is a crime with special extra penalties. But overall, it seems like we've accepted the idea that humans are humans, some do good things and some do bad things, and greater communication amplifies their ability to do both. Are we now saying that we've amplified as much as we want to, and we should stop? Or maybe we're saying that, because this is all taking place on a computer, we now think it should be a solvable problem, when it wasn't before with a telephone.
  - escherplex 8y ago
    And by extension, maybe as the POGO comic strip observed We have met the enemy and he is us
  - panarky 8y ago
    This is a great example, thank you. The good people who operate the postal service, courier services and telephone networks also deploy very capable security tools to ensure their services aren't used to create mayhem. It's not perfect, as occasionally FedEx will deliver a bomb, or the post office will deliver an envelope with anthrax powder, or a threat will be delivered by telephone. But you can tell that the security tools are operating effectively because these events are rare and isolated. When was the last time 50 people died because of DHL or Verizon? In contrast, Facebook released their creation on the world without the tools needed to keep it safe. Now they've lost control and are trying to deflect blame on "the industry". We cannot allow Facebook to escape accountability. It's their responsibility, not "the community" or "the industry". If they cannot fix it, and fast, then they must be rigorously regulated to disable features that cause more harm than good. Zuckerberg's latest strategy is to encrypt everything so even Facebook can't read it. This is one more cynical attempt to force others to bear the negative externalities of the monster he created.
erentz 8y ago
The partial root of the problem, I think, is that prior to Facebook, YouTube, et al. there were decision makers and responsible parties in the flow of such materials. So news agencies had to decide to print it, or broadcast it, or a publisher had to distribute it. Even on the internet, until fairly recently distribution meant you had to seek out the content you wanted. These people were all responsible for their decision. Now Facebook and YouTube are operating like broadcasters. They're the biggest broadcasters in the history of the world. And there is no human in the loop, there's no decision made. It's just some algorithms designed around harnessing attention. It's all automatic. And it can be used for harm. Distributors of the past couldn't absolve themselves of responsibility because they were in the loop. Distribution was a decision they made. Facebook and Youtube want to absolve themselves of any of the responsibility those distributors used to have. What this may mean, and we haven't seriously discussed it as a society, is that there was an automatic assumption that what we now have with FB and YouTube is right and okay. Perhaps it's not, and perhaps these platforms should be regulated in a way such that there is a "distributor" that is responsible, and/or a person has to "seek" the content. Totally as an quick thought experiment of how that might work, using Youtube for an example: YouTube channels would need to have validated owners, and all autoplaying and promotion of videos on YouTube would need to stop outside of those channels. Thus each channel becomes its own "distributor" with a responsible party. And users must seek content by subscribing to or choosing to view that channel. The negative implications of this are: 1. Youtube's business model changes, it's bad for Youtube, but it's maybe not nearly so bad if it's regulation that affects everyone the same way. 2. There's this idea that these platforms can also be used for good by allowing anonymous distribution of dissent and the like (e.g. Arab spring). This would quell that somewhat, to distribute dissent it would need to be done through, say, sending a video to one of the channel distributors who makes a decision to publish it or not, like a news agency of old. This isn't inherently bad, note how most of the big leaks of recent years have required responsible journalists to accept and publish the content. 3. There would need to be some regulation around deplatforming actions. For example, a person becomes a "distributor" on YouTube, they're authorized, and YouTube knows who they are. They're responsible. But if someone sends them snuff films, are they allows to broadcast them or not? In this case things are easier, because YouTube can block individual "distributors"/channels in a country like NZ based on local laws. In the US for example I don't think there is anything that makes distribution of this video we're talking about illegal, so it would probably be an issue if this regulated platform was able to decide to kick off this channel now. But it's certainly a lot less gray in this set up than it is in the current set up.
SomeBloke 8y ago
I watched the video, and for me it amplified and made tangible the senselessness of the act, the wanton and flat nature of the violence. I came away pitying the the perpetrator, their narrow zeal, their selfish mania, and the shameful path it took them down. I'm all for punishing incitement to violence, but I think the rush to squelch the video is misguided. In society we take lessons from the bad actors as well as the noble ones, and IMO there are good lessons to learn in watching this video.
- Applethief 8y ago
  Valid point. Here in New Zealand it has been banned. 14 years in jail for sharing it. I think Facebook acted well. They jumped on it as soon as they were made aware, did everything to remove it. So hats off to them. I still be think that this monster had great help in spreading the video. A team would have been uploading this on every major site and sharing like crazy to get to 1.5 million ...
  - aeternus 8y ago
    >14 years in jail for sharing it. That seems quite scary actually, all it takes to get someone thrown in jail for 14 years is to grab their phone/laptop when they're not looking or guess their password and share a video?
  - yarg 8y ago
    https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restricted-Material https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restric... 14 years is a maximum.

quink 8y ago

Yes, yes, ban more groups (including flat earth, climate denial and anti-vaxxers) while also killing the filter bubbles and no. These questions aren’t as hard as you think.

secfirstmd 8y ago
Well they get harder when certain governments abuse that power to stifle legitimate activists and journalists though: https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/fac...
godzillabrennus 8y ago
Where do you stop? Who decides what is banned? That seems like a hard question.
- sampo 8y ago
  For example, there is an equally strong scientific consensus that GMO crops (and food) are safe, as there is about climate change being real. But there are lots of users right here in HN who would get upset if their anti-GMO opinions were banned the same as climate change denial and anti-vaxxer opinions.
buboard 8y ago
fine, but wouldn't you rather have all the idiots in a single walled garden? If they get out of there, it will be for a distributed platform from which nobody will be able to remove anything.
- quink 8y ago
  Not really, there’s a new particularly vicious strand of radicalisation on the Internet and having the ability to make those hosting the content traceable and responsible through a fracturing of the community would be a boon, and that’s not really been happening with Facebook. And I don’t think distributed or decentralised platforms aren’t even close to the alternative you think they are.
maxxxxx 8y ago
"These questions aren’t as hard as you think." Yes, just let's block whatever you don't like. What could go wrong?
- quink 8y ago
  That’s just coincidental, it’s just that what I don’t like and complete disagreement with scientific consensus or harming people overlap.
  - eitland 8y ago
    Go 200, 300 or 400 year back. Imagine a person like yourself, mainstream opinions, politically correct. We now know he would be wrong on a number of things. I mostly agree with you on a case-by-case basis it seems, but a little humility might be good.
    - bryan_w 8y ago
      You don't even have to go that far back. Just 20 years ago the idea that being gay was ok would get you treated like an anti-vaxer today. Go back 50 years and "race mixing" was taboo.
      - quink 8y ago
        There was no broad scientific consensus about how being gay is bad 20 years ago. Banning from one particular private platform is fine, if people want to be anti-vaccination don't do it there, maybe it'll actually encourage them to stop wasting time on Facebook and contributing to the actual science.
    - quink 8y ago
      Scientific consensus didn't exist in anything like its current form 200, 300 or 400 years ago.
austhrow743 8y ago
They're going to take their discourse elsewhere. Best to just skip the whack a mole and put them in camps.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Because of course, we all know that any regulation is part of an inevitable slide to “camps”. Come on, people who argue that always seem to miss just how much power a society has to change course, which is why that slippery slope is a fallacy and not predestination. I’m not hearing people opine that “today they came for the child abusers, tomorrow the Jews.” It’s a ridiculous premise, and it both oversells the threat of any action they’re ideologically opposed to, and undersells the power we all have to either promote or fight fascism.
- quink 8y ago
  Sure they will. I'm perfectly fine with the whack-a-mole but detain anyone who's a credible threat to the physical safety of others. I'm talking about limiting the freedom of anyone in theory talking about subjects in a way that results in physical violence or substantially harms society to the point of losing a substantial number of lives on one single private platform in large groups. I'm not talking about death camps, but the distinction seems to be lost on the crowd flitting down the slippery slope.

panarky 8y ago

Facebook built a monster it cannot control. Their monster is out of the cage and it's making frightening changes to society, rapidly and globally. I have an extremely strong bias in favor of free expression, but Facebook altered the playing field. Do we really want ISIS beheading videos and terrorist recruitment to circulate freely, amplified and accelerated by Facebook's social graph? [0] Do we really want disinformation fanned out instantly to friends of friends that incites mob violence? [1] No, I don't want to live in a world where a faceless ML automatically censors everything I do. But if that's the only way to control the monster Facebook created, then maybe it's better to switch off the monster entirely. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-moderator-guidelines-extreme-content-analysis https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-modera... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-remove-misinformation-that-leads-to-violence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/facebook-to-re...

adrianmonk 8y ago
I sometimes wonder if people asked the same questions when postal services and telephones were invented. People are writing letters to each other and conspiring about things, and no one can even track it! People are calling each other on the telephone and plotting crimes with no one the wiser! I suppose in at least one way they did, because mail fraud is a crime with special extra penalties. But overall, it seems like we've accepted the idea that humans are humans, some do good things and some do bad things, and greater communication amplifies their ability to do both. Are we now saying that we've amplified as much as we want to, and we should stop? Or maybe we're saying that, because this is all taking place on a computer, we now think it should be a solvable problem, when it wasn't before with a telephone.
- escherplex 8y ago
  And by extension, maybe as the POGO comic strip observed We have met the enemy and he is us
- panarky 8y ago
  This is a great example, thank you. The good people who operate the postal service, courier services and telephone networks also deploy very capable security tools to ensure their services aren't used to create mayhem. It's not perfect, as occasionally FedEx will deliver a bomb, or the post office will deliver an envelope with anthrax powder, or a threat will be delivered by telephone. But you can tell that the security tools are operating effectively because these events are rare and isolated. When was the last time 50 people died because of DHL or Verizon? In contrast, Facebook released their creation on the world without the tools needed to keep it safe. Now they've lost control and are trying to deflect blame on "the industry". We cannot allow Facebook to escape accountability. It's their responsibility, not "the community" or "the industry". If they cannot fix it, and fast, then they must be rigorously regulated to disable features that cause more harm than good. Zuckerberg's latest strategy is to encrypt everything so even Facebook can't read it. This is one more cynical attempt to force others to bear the negative externalities of the monster he created.

erentz 8y ago

The partial root of the problem, I think, is that prior to Facebook, YouTube, et al. there were decision makers and responsible parties in the flow of such materials. So news agencies had to decide to print it, or broadcast it, or a publisher had to distribute it. Even on the internet, until fairly recently distribution meant you had to seek out the content you wanted. These people were all responsible for their decision. Now Facebook and YouTube are operating like broadcasters. They're the biggest broadcasters in the history of the world. And there is no human in the loop, there's no decision made. It's just some algorithms designed around harnessing attention. It's all automatic. And it can be used for harm. Distributors of the past couldn't absolve themselves of responsibility because they were in the loop. Distribution was a decision they made. Facebook and Youtube want to absolve themselves of any of the responsibility those distributors used to have. What this may mean, and we haven't seriously discussed it as a society, is that there was an automatic assumption that what we now have with FB and YouTube is right and okay. Perhaps it's not, and perhaps these platforms should be regulated in a way such that there is a "distributor" that is responsible, and/or a person has to "seek" the content. Totally as an quick thought experiment of how that might work, using Youtube for an example: YouTube channels would need to have validated owners, and all autoplaying and promotion of videos on YouTube would need to stop outside of those channels. Thus each channel becomes its own "distributor" with a responsible party. And users must seek content by subscribing to or choosing to view that channel. The negative implications of this are: 1. Youtube's business model changes, it's bad for Youtube, but it's maybe not nearly so bad if it's regulation that affects everyone the same way. 2. There's this idea that these platforms can also be used for good by allowing anonymous distribution of dissent and the like (e.g. Arab spring). This would quell that somewhat, to distribute dissent it would need to be done through, say, sending a video to one of the channel distributors who makes a decision to publish it or not, like a news agency of old. This isn't inherently bad, note how most of the big leaks of recent years have required responsible journalists to accept and publish the content. 3. There would need to be some regulation around deplatforming actions. For example, a person becomes a "distributor" on YouTube, they're authorized, and YouTube knows who they are. They're responsible. But if someone sends them snuff films, are they allows to broadcast them or not? In this case things are easier, because YouTube can block individual "distributors"/channels in a country like NZ based on local laws. In the US for example I don't think there is anything that makes distribution of this video we're talking about illegal, so it would probably be an issue if this regulated platform was able to decide to kick off this channel now. But it's certainly a lot less gray in this set up than it is in the current set up.

SomeBloke 8y ago

I watched the video, and for me it amplified and made tangible the senselessness of the act, the wanton and flat nature of the violence. I came away pitying the the perpetrator, their narrow zeal, their selfish mania, and the shameful path it took them down. I'm all for punishing incitement to violence, but I think the rush to squelch the video is misguided. In society we take lessons from the bad actors as well as the noble ones, and IMO there are good lessons to learn in watching this video.

Applethief 8y ago
Valid point. Here in New Zealand it has been banned. 14 years in jail for sharing it. I think Facebook acted well. They jumped on it as soon as they were made aware, did everything to remove it. So hats off to them. I still be think that this monster had great help in spreading the video. A team would have been uploading this on every major site and sharing like crazy to get to 1.5 million ...
- aeternus 8y ago
  >14 years in jail for sharing it. That seems quite scary actually, all it takes to get someone thrown in jail for 14 years is to grab their phone/laptop when they're not looking or guess their password and share a video?
- yarg 8y ago
  https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restricted-Material https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restric... 14 years is a maximum.