26 ms·

Tech Companies Are Deleting Evidence of War Crimes

587 points by anfilt 7y ago

caprese 7y ago
Hit them with obstruction of justice until they have to exit the market entirely
- differentView 7y ago
  They're not in the war crime evidence storage market.
  - djakjxnanjak 7y ago
    Facebook disseminates propaganda: war crime! Facebook deletes evidence of atrocities: war crime!
    - caprese 7y ago
      Yes thats the point Make it impossible for them to operate in this market
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rlt 7y ago
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  This. It is simply not possible to have these platforms host this kind of content and it boils down to money. If you want Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the likes you need ads. Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. If people were ready to pay for a platform with "raw" footage of others' lives there could be a place for it. So far the market has proven otherwise.
  - 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
    An interesting take on a place where they did their best to accommodate is Slate Star Codex's Culture War thread on Reddit [0]. I've wrestled with this for a while but as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter become ubiquitous, forcing views contrary to internal ones off the platforms is wildly irresponsible. On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. I do agree it's money-driven but it doesn't work long-term; it's an interesting problem and I hope a phase of maturity comes soon because it's not as if alternative views can just set up their own platforms [1]. [0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... [1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/gab-is-down-as-godaddy-paypal-pull-service-following-synagogue-shooting/ https://www.cnet.com/news/gab-is-down-as-godaddy-paypal-pull...
    - naasking 7y ago
      > On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. So you shouldn't have to provide services to people you find objectionable, even if those people are in a protected class? It's a common but mistaken belief that we have no obligations to society or to our fellow citizens. For hosting specifically, it depends on multiple factors: your ubiquity, the demographics of your audience, the intended/stated purpose, etc. For instance, the Supreme Court recently decided unanimously that social media is the public square, and so no law can restrict access to social media (they were trying to ban sex offenders from social media). Considering Twitter's and Facebook's stated purposes are to become the place for all online conversation and debate, if they achieve that goal then censoring content arguably violates people's rights. Doubly so because people like Jack Conte have literally stated that access to social media is a human right.
      - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
        It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. In this case, the Supreme Court made it clear that governments cannot prevent people from using social media. However other Supreme Court decisions have it that property owners don't have to allow others to use their property for speech, except in unusual cases like company towns. It's not obvious to me that they will find these two ideas to be in conflict.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Yep. What do people want? First everyone goes crazy that people can find stuff on these platforms, then they go crazy that you can't. I find all this pinning of the world's problems on Facebook/Twitter/Google irritating. Sure they have a lot to answer for, but it's not like propaganda, censorship, or media manipulation did not exist before. Sigh. I guess they are an easy target to pick on.
  - ghjjjj 7y ago
    “First everyone goes crazy that people can find stuff on these platforms, ” I don’t. I get crazy when effectively censor at the behest of (any) government under the “we’re private” excuse. I’m perfectly consistent about this. That and our imperative need to break apart the big tech companies (and bank, but that’s a different question)
    - naasking 7y ago
      > I get crazy when effectively censor at the behest of (any) government under the “we’re private” excuse. It's depressing how quickly people are willing to throw away the civil and human rights that have taken millennia to win. Let's hope it doesn't take actual violence to remind people of the difference between speech and violence. We haven't had real physical strife and a world war in our generation to keep this distinction fresh in our minds.
      - cr0sh 7y ago
        > We haven't had real physical strife and a world war in our generation to keep this distinction fresh in our minds. Don't worry, we're doing our best to make it happen, give it time, we'll get there! /the nice thing is, the next world war after that will only involve sticks and stones...
      - mattlondon 7y ago
        > We haven't had real physical strife Perhaps not in the west. There has been significant physical strife for millions of people in Africa and the middle east for some time that shows no real sign of ending any time soon.
behringer 7y ago
I'm not interested in seeing war crimes on facebook. If you want to disseminate that stuff, use a public forum where that stuff is welcome. There are countless places. Facebook and the spin users give is not welcome by me and no doubt by others.
- wnoise 7y ago
  Facebook is millions, if not billions of tiny public forums. The problem is that people seem to want them all to have the same standards. If you don't want stuff like this on your wall or feed, it's easy to keep out. If the admins of a group don't want this showing up, they too can filter it out. But people seem to be demanding that not only do they not have to see content they dislike, but that no one else can either.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    It's the nature of censorship that people want to censor what other people see, not what they see themselves. We believe we're able to make our own decisions and we're in control of our minds, but those other people who aren't us might not be and are in danger of bad influences.
    - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
      Speak for yourself. People who support censorship, sure. "We"? No.
      - lopmotr 7y ago
        By "we", I mean most people, as evidenced by all democratic governments censoring various things, presumably because their voters want to prevent the rest of their country from seeing them. Same goes for restrictions on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc. People who're concerned about their health won't be doing those things themselves and don't need a law to stop them, but they want to protect what they see as irresponsible other people. That might be a fair judgement but it's still a judgement about other people being somehow weaker and needing to be protected from themselves.
o10449366 7y ago
This article seems mostly concerned about Facebook and YouTube's opaque filtering systems, but the authors are looking in the wrong place. These platforms aren't and shouldn't be responsible for hosting violent and disturbing content - regardless of its purpose or utility. The authors themselves discuss the can of worms that open when you start accommodating the interests of some groups and not others; it isn't sustainable and it isn't possible. Instead, this article should have focused less on the decisions of AI systems and neural networks, which can be difficult to decipher and interpret, and more on the decisions of the humans behind these tech companies. The latter is much easier to scrutinize and dissect. I think the truly concerning initiatives are projects like Google's Dragonfly. There's absolutely nothing opaque about a search engine that will actively assist the Chinese government with whitewashing history for a billion individuals. These are the decisions that should be examined.
- djakjxnanjak 7y ago
  >Instead, this article should have focused less on the decisions of AI systems and neural networks, which can be difficult to decipher and interpret, and more on the decisions of the humans behind these tech companies. The latter is much easier to scrutinize and dissect. I agree with your comment overall but this common assumption bothers me. We can put a debugger in a neural net, we can’t put one in a human brain. People get angry when a policy decision is made that targets them, and are told by that the people responsible that the decision was implemented with a neural net. Then they get mad at the neural net, which shifts blame away from the humans who control it.
leshokunin 7y ago
The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and I don't mean Twitter. I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's not "look at this tweet I got!"
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I guess the reason people put these things on social media is to raise awareness of it. The problem is that they fail to also send a copy to the relevant authorities.
  - joeseeder 7y ago
    I think you are completely missing the point why they are ending up on these platforms... Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement. Most of the people these sharing atrocities are aware only about platforms we call social media. For them these are the only ways they know how to make it public, for the world to see and hope we will act.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement... I've lived in these nations, and if you can send via internet to Twitter, you can send to the UN. In fact, you can send to both at the same time.
pergadad 7y ago
Very interesting article. Essentially: there is a legitimate need for such content, namely to hold the perpetrators accountable. So the question might be: how can this content still be accessed later by e.g. researchers/prosecutors/...? On the other hand that then opens the door for a dictator (we seem to have plenty of them nowadays) to ask for deletion of content and then use the stored materials still to identify e.g. regime critics. Really difficult issue.
hellllllllooo 7y ago
The issue with doing things at huge scale are all the edge cases. If Facebook wants to have all the benefits and money it gets from owning its huge network it also has the responsibility of having to treat different content with nuance. These kinds of issues are one reason why Facebook wants to move towards a more private network with more private interactions so it can avoid having to deal with the endless complexity of human interaction in public.
iscrewyou 7y ago
I just wish it was easy to turn their algorithms off. All these companies were good before those algorithms started. Like feed for Facebook & Twitter, recommendations for YouTube. That would solve a lot of problems. It would make sure people aren’t exposed to things unwillingly and these companies won’t be on the hook for it but it will also make sure things aren’t getting reported and taken down as much as they should (for law enforcement tracking purposes).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
intended 7y ago
What do people expect? Isn’t this uncharted territory for everyone? Everyone can report, but the public sphere where this happens is owned by a company which needs profit. Humanity was always insulated from what the worst that happened at that minute by the difficulty of transmitting information over older mediums. This means incentives are not aligned here - speaking the truth, keeping you engaged, and keeping Disney land clean. A person in the UK who wakes up in the morning doesn’t want to see evidence that South American violence has resulted in an entire village being eradicated. As a species We were insulated from thinking at species scale. We could do village and perhaps nation scale on and average human basis. A rare few people can think at a planetary or greater scale regularly. So how precisely should this be structured ?
- psychoslave 7y ago
  That's an interesting point regarding human cognition limits. Thanks to this comment I found Capacity limits of informationprocessing in the brain, by René Marois and Jason Ivanoff[1]. Intuitively I would think the gap of organizational difficulty between a village and nation be far more important than the one between a nation and the whole mankind. I mean that I would expect, a national organizational process to require far more logistic sophistication and far many more explicitly reproducible/scalable processes than what you need in a village. Of course, some of these processes can be argued as directly conflicting with a "mankind scale mindset", but it doesn't really seems to make a greater gap than one that isolate a mind in a smaller human scale. [1] http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/marois/Publications/Marois_Ivanoff-2005.pdf http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/marois/Publications/Ma...
- naasking 7y ago
  Excellent point. Arguably content targeting should consider geographic location (and it probably does to some extent). If we have to start categorizing content so we can preserve journalism with objectionable content, geographic scoring should get boosted even more.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  That should be the top comment on this thread. > A person in the UK who wakes up in the morning doesn’t want to see evidence that South American violence has resulted in an entire village being eradicated. And really, why should they? It's not like they can do anything over the issue. They can get the abstract news and go live their lives. Yet, it's extremely important that some people get the evidence, and those are specific people, but distributed geographically and culturally so that I have no idea how to identify them.
nunez 7y ago
Aren’t sites like LiveLeak better for this kind of content? Won’t this kind of content make it there anyway?
- lopmotr 7y ago
  It could be ordinary people using what they're familiar with. If an emergency suddenly happens, who's going to spend half an hour dicking around researching what site to use and going through their signup procedure and installing their app and all that?
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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subjoriented 7y ago
The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign influence campaigns typically attempt to magnify grassroots dissenting opinions (this is true also of US foreign intelligence efforts). There's many reasons why these kinds of apps, comments, and conversations are taken down due to their content. Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform. Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well. It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades. It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Australia lacks safe harbour laws which the US has had for some time. This has a chilling effect on certain types of platforms. Even something like a photo hosting site is very risk heavy in Australia as the type of content on your servers is your responsibility. I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms start moderating more and more. Now, I am all in favour of moderation. Real life communities are moderated, and all the strongest online communities have some kind of moderation. But there needs to be protections for companies who are moderating the best they can and still have evil content on the site. Else these platforms won't be sustainable and will be in heavy legal risk to boot. They won't make much sense anymore.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
The podcast episode "post no evil" about Facebooks moderation problems, covers something very similar where during the Mexican border drug wars people were posting images of dead bodies hung from overpassed and shootouts. Facebook had internal debates over whether this counted as news or breached content guidelines I recommend the podcast greatly. But perhaps we need a simpler approach - a funded "journalism" archive where the tech firms can shift the posts to online storage (ie not delete it) but section it off for later analysis. Seems the only likely compromise.
- medecau 7y ago
  Something like the Internet Archive?
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    Except nobody goes to the Internet Archive unless they're looking for something extremely specific. The benefit of Facebook as a platform is that you can reach a wide audience in a place where often going to the authorities means either jack squat or your incarceration or worse.
    - medecau 7y ago
      Sure. I meant to say the Internet Archive can be used as the 'funded "journalism" archive' that GP mentioned.
      - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
        I did think that was one possibility - but this needs to be funded and supported by the tech firms themselves not handed off and forgotten. I can imagine a way of referencing these redacted images that facebooks just puts up a big red sign and a warning - but that still allows people to find it and it acts as a full web citizen.
- 6nf 7y ago
  And now Facebook is banning random harmless idiots like Paul Joseph Watson - for 'being a dangerous individual' even though he's clearly not a terrorist or whatever. It's insane.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
Of course the point I forgot to make is that we suddenly have access to all the world's evidence - that every good and bad issue around the globe is now passing through these forms data centres ... and we are not used to that. Our brains seem wired to weight bad news much more heavily. We need to remember Douglas Adams advice - "It's vitally important not to have a sense of perspective"
docker_up 7y ago
This sounds like a perfect reason why sites like LiveLeak exist. I don't know if I care that Facebook doesn't host videos that go against its TOS, but if sites like LiveLeak are forbidden from hosting these videos even though they want to, it would make me worried.
- vokep 7y ago
  This. Censor the mall (facebook, twitter) where families and your grandma hangout from stuff they would never want to see But let the wild west (liveleak, 4chan, etc) stay wild.
thereisnospork 7y ago
A thought experiment: If 9/11 had happened today, what would their policies mean for that footage? What should they do to censor it, if anything? Consider too the increase in camera density over the past two decades.
BirWebDesign 7y ago
Damn them all. God, let them all be devastated.
happytreefrens 7y ago
These tech companies decide, often in unison, to deplatform people, types of legal content, or political views. There is clearly coordination among news outlets, social media companies, and tech companies (everything from payment processors to web hosting). Who is doing this coordination? To what end? Is there a common thread in the deplatforming, smearing, and silencing campaigns?
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  There need not be a single "who" behind it in as much as a set of convergent processes with the same goal of control and power. It is coordination of the kind of "going after the Joneses", because Chinese get away with it and gave useful results, so can we, ethics and long term effects be damned.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > to deplatform people, types of legal content, or political views. Who determines what is legal? What is legal in my country may not be in your's, and vice-versa. How do you decide what to show on an international media platform in such a case? Neither? Both? Let the user decide? What if my (your's) government won't let me (you) decide? On political views, I'm not sure how to answer or correct this. History has shown humanity that there are certain political views which are very "sticky", in the sense that they answer to something deeper in the human psyche in a way that with the right leader(s), they can create and sustain mass followings that can play host to violence and atrocity of a frightening scale against those who don't adhere to such political (or social) views. Such political views have proven so horrifying, that certain parts of humanity has sought to stamp them out before they take hold again, to "nip them in the bud" before they even gain any kind of ground. But the internet has proven to be fertile soil in which such views can hide and proliferate. This is at odds with the want to allow freedom of speech and information. Such views are akin to "fighting words" or "yelling 'fire' in a theater" where such a danger doesn't exist. But they a honestly worse than that; in certain ways, such views can become and border on cultish and religious behaviour. I could perhaps make parallels between a certain religion and a certain government of ancient times, but I'm sure you can see that (it was all politics, and it continues to play out to this day). Is it better if we just let these views proliferate, let their political voice get louder, let them influence others until what was an atrocity committed by them becomes a lawfully executed act, as they gain political power and control? Do we just let these views and the people behind them grow and grow, until another world war ensues? Because that's where it leads. We know this. We've seen it play out multiple times in the past. Which is why such wide "censorship" occurs. At the same time, I don't know whether I really agree with it or not. Right now, it's considered legal because the internet is not considered a "place" or a "public sphere". It's just a bunch of interconnected privately owned networks for the most part, and we've voted in politicians (not everywhere or worldwide of course) that want and have kept it that way. It's strange, here in the United States with the current federal government; the party mostly in power, or who came into power, put in place people in the FCC (Pai) who virtually killed off net neutrality, and also (Pai and long before him, via ALEC laws pandered to city/state governments, most in control by the same party) made it virtually impossible for "public internet", or even third-parties outside the almost monopoly of cable and telephone providers to give better or public service of the internet to people. In other words, this party has lobbied and pulled the strings hard in order to keep the internet tightly and corporately controlled, fully private, blocking public access or "transport" on the lines. Yet certain people of that same party are now complaining when views they espouse (or maybe silently agree with) are being "suppressed" due to market forces and such on that same private network. It's a classic (and dumb) case of "wanting your cake and eating it too". If they really wanted their views to be allowed freer reign, they should have pushed for full net neutrality and for public and open infrastructure for carrying broadband for everyone. Make it cheap, make it equitable, make it easy to access. Unfortunately, they know this will also allow other views, potentially views they don't agree with, to also be voiced, and they don't want that, either. Sigh.
8bitsrule 7y ago
Social media have successfully created the illusion that they are (to some extent, at least) public spaces. This is another reminder that they are not. OTOH, truly public spaces on the internet ... where reasonable speech can truly be free ... are in very short supply. By accident or intention, this is a crappy state of affairs. This isn't a new topic. 20 years ago, Lessig wrote, "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear." https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/arts/adding-up-the-costs-of-cyberdemocracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/arts/adding-up-the-costs-... If our free speech is limited only to the inside walls of walled gardens, that's not their fault.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > OTOH, truly public spaces on the internet ... where reasonable speech can truly be free ... are in very short supply. Who decides what is "reasonable"? One's person or group's "reasonable" is another's call to regulation, if not censorship by various means. How can this conundrum be solved on an international network composed of both adults and children accessing the same content? I'm not expecting you or anyone else to chime in with a solution; I obviously don't have one myself. But ultimately, this information hydra we've created will need taming in some manner, or it may eat the world alive.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    Who decides? Good question. But IMO, democracy is not the strong suit of most corporations. Here in the US, back in the fabled wild west, the solution was not to expect the law to be upheld by grocers, blacksmiths, or bankers. The public hired professionals. So, I reckon, maybe we need some laws to enforce.
Quanttek 7y ago
I've noticed that myself as I'm analyzing influential public statements with regards to the Rohingya for my Bachelor thesis on their discrimination and genocide. Unfortunately, Facebook was one of the biggest channels for dehumanizing and incendiary content but this is all gone now. I think FB should at least provide researchers access to an archive of removed content.
msiyer 7y ago
Is this really a technology problem? Are we so naive that we believe these things were not happening in the past? This problem cannot be solved in the consciousness we currently exist in. The people running the world and those who ought to run it are entirely different.
deanclatworthy 7y ago
These platforms can do no right. If Facebook/Youtube leave a video online of a beheading of John Smith from <Country X> then <Country X> inevitably calls them out for promoting and hosting this "illegal" content. Now, they're being chastised for taking it down too. Maybe, just maybe, these companies have internal processes for handing over such materials to the relevant authorities, and don't need to rely on armchair detectives to investigate war crimes.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  The actual question is if the process is used to silence lies or uncomfortable truth. Or more Machiavellian, shape the discourse in ways favorable to rulers without regard to either. These processes are ran by greedy people, not out of anyone's goodwill.
- megous 7y ago
  Ok, what these processes are, and where are they docummented? Because I seriously doubt they exist. I've certainly not read any articles about tech companies having any such thing, and actually helping researchers and archiving organizations. Also there's no jurisdiction or relevant authorities for many war zones. So archiving and docummenting is the only option now, to help potential investigations and trials in the future.
- Xelbair 7y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, we can decide if content platforms are responsible for user content or not.. and stick to that decision. Quite frankly i am against any form of censorship.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    Let's say you make users responsible for the content they create; how do you intend to enforce that? Country A's User B uploads Content C that User D in Country E find's objectionable, or in Country E is illegal to view or possess, while in Country A is perfectly legal. How do you enforce that? Labels or tags aren't the answer, because Content C could be labeled/tagged as X,Y,Z where X,Y,Z are orthogonal to the content, and bear no relation to it. Do you allow it to be viewed by User D, and if it isn't legal, then put that on User D to be responsible to...what? Unview it? More than a few of these problems are all because we humans have decided without consensus or agreement that some information is "bad" while other information is "good", and even that "good" information is only viewable by certain people of that group who meet a certain age requirement. All of it is very arbitrary, and at odds with itself on the world stage. This issue won't be solved easily, if at all. Instead, we'll likely just continue to make more convoluted laws that can't be followed and/or all descend into totalitarian walled garden states isolated from each other while atrocities continue behind those walls, telling each other within that "we're the free and prosperous ones; those over there are not". Why does this narrative seem so damn familiar...?
stef25 7y ago
Couldn't they take down the content but keep it available for neutral third parties to evaluate and collect? There has to be a better way to collect evidence of war crimes than leaving decapitation videos visible on social media for all to see. Maybe the ICC could even launch their own platform where this kind of content can be submitted.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  You don't think there's value in people seeing what horrible things are being committed? If we reduce "news" to the words on a newspaper page or the heavily curated images in a TV news report, who's ever going to give a shit about anything?
- megous 7y ago
  Removed videos need not be graphic. War crimes take many forms. Bombings of hospitals and schools. Mass shellings of cities. Destruction of vital infrastructure, etc. You'll not see any blood or torn bodies. It will just expose lies of some nation state's propaganda. These kinds of videos get removed too. Either directly or indirectly by banning the entire account, if it posts more videos that are questionable - which is likely. Or because of targetting by trolls using false complaints. Though I'm not that worried. Many people already know the perils of YouTube, and archive everything at first sight. It just serves the nation state's propaganda, that is usually left untouched, because it's served via more official media channels.
onesmallcoin 7y ago
We couldn't have started the discussion of systematic censorship in a better way It's hard to come up with one rule that works for everyone It's normal to have a knee jerk response to censor something if what your looking at is terrible and you wouldn't want other people to see the bad thing, but it is also important that we as a race try to learn from our mistakes; and censorship straight to deletion is burning the evidence. This may fall short of crazy talk around here: But maybe we need a human element in the curation of our digital libary, and a way for society as a whole to have input on this process, not just in removing the offending content; but also in keeping track of it too help people to be accountable for their actions. Full Disclosure: I'm also a resident of christchurch, new zealand where the mosque shooting happened recently I saw our goverment block multiple websites via DNS, in a country where this kind pf censorship is otherwise unheard of: We honestly didn't know if the systems were in place for this kind of censorship. So my 2c is that if you are in a five-eyes nation, they almost certainly have the capacity to conduct this kind of attack.
Quequau 7y ago
Surely there's a difference between not publishing (to the general public) on their platform and not making such content available to the relevant authorities.
cf141q5325 7y ago
This is a very serious issue by far not limited to facebook and youtube. The problem goes much further then private companies not wanting the content on their site. Its very much motivated by a push of governments to purge terrorism propaganda and stuff that could be used to radicalize people. The best example is, or better was, reddits /r/syriancivilwar. The subreddit collected all and every information available on the conflict, from every side. This brought them in direct conflict with reddit admins, who banned multiple users for linking to terrorism propaganda, namely ISIS videos and AMAQ statements, the ISIS news agency. The subbredit is now a shell of its former self because its reduced to a propaganda platform for factions which are socially acceptable, instead of a place to document the war and its atrocities. It however doesnt stop there. The content wasnt hosted at reddit but literally anywhere where there is a hope it might not be immediately taken down. From piracy favored streaming services to archiv.org mirrors. Which all get taken down for distributing terrorism propaganda instead of violating the TOS. When you hear about terrorism propaganda, there is a good chance we are talking about not just evidence of warcrimes, but also material that is important to understand how people can get radicalized. And how to counter that propaganda. People at risk of radicalization can still access the material while the public as a whole looses the insight into the mind of those people entirely. And the people at risk drift off into echo chambers. And for a lack of information we are doing nothing to counter that propaganda, quite the opposite. I doubt the media at large could have done ISIS a bigger favor by their coverage of focusing simply on the barbarism of the videos. They missed the point entirely, the barbarism was very much a part of ISIS propaganda. The reporting was great for getting views, but only reenforced the people who already entered the echochambers. And hoping on a purely military solution sounds absolutely naive to me. Its very much a task for society as a whole to watch out that people dont drop into those echo chambers and get radicalized. Framing this issue as "AI gone wrong" misses the point entirely. The content would also have been deleted by a human. And with the given political development, its not overly pessimistic to assume that people publicly hosting content will be forced to remove any such content immediately or face prosecution. Which only helps with getting reelected for signaling to combat terrorism instead of actually doing anything against terrorism. Not to sound overly pessimistic, but the situation looks really dire to me. I had hoped that we as a society had learned our lesson about book burning. And the issue is not a new one. Mein Kampf is still not readily available in Germany for the "fear that it might turn people into nazis". Serdar Sommuncu made the only reasonable thing here and started touring Germany reading from Mein Kampf as well as famous propaganda speeches to show how ridiculous they are. There is nothing special about them. There isnt some hidden insight in those books that turn people into Nazis. But our treatment of them might convince people at risk that there has to be something about them, or they wouldnt be banned in the first place. I fear very much the same development from the array of far right terrorists with their manifests. Instead of the rambling of lunatics they are it gets treated as something that is dangerous as it apparently might convince people.
faithteams 7y ago
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Digit-Al 7y ago
So, here's an idea. Let's take the case of YouTube, instead of its algorithm deleting this content, how about it is marked with a flag. Normal users are completely unable to view, or even know of the existence of content marked with this flag. It doesn't come up in searches and even a direct link will just show some "content unavailable" message. Human rights groups and the like can request permission for a designated user to have a "special administrator" permission. Anyone with that permission will see a permission toggle when they look at someone's user account. That toggle will allow them to give or revoke permission to view these "forbidden" videos. That will then allows these organisations to give access to anyone they deem suitable to help them police these videos. There would need to be some sort of safeguards to make sure that permission is not accidentally given to a minor or something. This should solve a lot of the problems I reckon. Thoughts?
- yters 7y ago
  Yes, some sort of tiered access seems better than mass deletion. However, I'm sure all these videos still exist somewhere in backup. I doubt they are really deleted.
- toxicFork 7y ago
  How do you sell this to YouTube or enforce this on them, to first accept then prioritise this functionality? What benefits do they gain or what alternatives do they avoid, as a company for profit?
- jeandejean 7y ago
  Why would Human rights groups be entitled to have this censorship privilege? So they'd decide now what's good or bad to display on Youtube? If anyone needs evidence, it is Justice prosecutors and it is likely already possible. Deleted from user-facing Youtube and Facebook and the like doesn't mean it's deleted from their storage... Plus the title is misleading: they're not deleting evidence of war crimes, they're deleting upsetting and distressing videos from their open platform, and that's a good thing! Nothing proves they don't already pass these videos to law enforcement.
  - 7y ago
v_lisivka 7y ago
Number looks very little, if compared to Russia backing. Russia has whole TV channels backed by FSB, whole troll fabrics, and their own agents even in major Western media. Why few orders of magnitude greater effort cannot help Russia, while much smaller effort helps USA a lot?
- gdy 7y ago
  "Number looks very little, if compared to Russia backing. Russia has whole TV channels backed by FSB, whole troll fabrics, and their own agents even in major Western media." [Citation needed]
  - v_lisivka 7y ago
    See https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ About EU vs Disinformation campaign This website is part of a campaign to better forecast, address and respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation. The ‘EU versus Disinformation’ campaign is run by the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force. The team was set up after the EU Heads of State and Government stressed the need to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns in March 2015.
    - gdy 7y ago
      You could have as well given a link to google.com. You have made several specific russophobic claims and I challenge you to substatiate them and not leave that as 'an exercise for the reader'.
      - v_lisivka 7y ago
        These claims are not russophobic. We are at war with Russian Federation for 5 years. It's clearly demonstrates that we have no phobia. They are anti-russian. Please, list claims you are interested to dig in.
        gdy 7y ago
notOnUrBestDay 7y ago
Wow. What the fuck do you want me to do about it? Care?
basetop 7y ago
Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic. Youtube, facebook, reddit, google search, etc have all been targeted by the atlantic, nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc and bullied into scrubbing content and direct their users to "authoritative sources". Ironically enough, in china, russia and most countries, "authoritative sources" are state propaganda organs. But we are different or so I'm told. Our "authoritative sources" are independent news organizations who strangely enough push the same message with the same talking points. What a coincidence. For "independent" "news" organizations, they sure are united in the same message. This censorship has been going on for at least 5 years now. Maybe the atlantic journalists should investigate their editors as to why the atlantic has supported censorship? Or maybe the atlantic journalists should start investigating nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc. Why so many government/intelligence agency people are working in media. Why so many children of politicians ( Bushes, Clintons, McCains, Cuomos, etc ) have prominent positions in the media? Or is the atlantic only interested in war crime evidence that suit their agenda ( pushing for war in syria, venezuela, etc )? This article is so weird. It's like an arsonist setting a house on fire and telling everyone that the house is on fire.
- candiodari 7y ago
  > Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic. Don't underestimate governments forcing these companies to hide evidence of their own misdeeds. Even governments that you wouldn't traditionally think of as abusive. Take for yourself what a realistic number is for police abuse and then how much gets filmed and uploaded. Then search on Youtube. Clearly, someone's asking for removals in the US. Same for Europe. I doubt very much it's the Atlantic doing that.
- brightball 7y ago
  Stuff like this is why I still see value in own encyclopedias, history books, etc. I simply don't trust resources that can be edited/deleted at any time.
  - dorfsmay 7y ago
Nasrudith 7y ago
To be frank tech companies are a second order symptom of fucked up societal attitudes pushing the censorship. The puritan mass market push towards "child friendly mass market" as a default which leaves no place for the ugliness of reality. They don't care about suffering - they just don't want to see it. It is narcissistic sociopathy as a norm - how dare they run out of a burning building in their underwear! Children might see them! That it is the middle of the night is no concern - they don't want "inappropriate content" in a back alley. They want it gone. The tech companies tend towards doing nothing until the masses of "think of the children" complaints about "objectionable" content. The absence of those masses of people is what I miss the most about the internet not being mainstream. I personally believe what we need is to offend those busybodies as much as possible until they fuck off into their own bubble.
- indigochill 7y ago
  >The absence of those masses of people is what I miss the most about the internet not being mainstream. I've seen this sentiment before, but I don't get it. Sure, the internet's mainstream and there are parts of it that have a mainstream culture and that's probably not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. But the internet itself has no culture (heh). It's just a network. There are still corners of the internet that have whatever culture you're looking for. And if you can't find it, you can make it. It probably won't make much money or make the news, but the option is there. That said, I agree with the main thrust of your argument that tech companies are just reflecting the mainstream preference to whitewash reality.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    The sentiment is based on the transformative and displacing effects of the mainstream and "old internet" refers to culture as opposed to the network. I am well aware that niche chasing is the way to achieve it for now. What the sentiment longs for as ideal is for influence to have worked more in the opposite direction. Instead we get advertisers trying to be the tail wagging the dog again when people left their last venture over the blandness they imposed.
indigochill 7y ago
Stratechery had an article that I think provides a reasonable compromise for displaying and taking responsibility of content some might find objectionable but which others would argue has value. It involves the poster being responsible and owning the consequences for the content as opposed to some third party platform which has to try to please opposing sides. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-internet/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-...
weego 7y ago
It's not evidence, at best it is hearsay. We have no way to validate truth from fiction.
j-c-hewitt 7y ago
I think the whole notion of war as a whodunnit crime is pretty moronic at a fundamental level. #1, you don't have jurisdiction. #2, if you hoped to gain jurisdiction, the most important thing is not piecing together the facts of the case, but winning the war. If you want to go after the Libyan National Army for doing bad things, you have to go to war with Libya and defeat their army. The trouble with going to war with Libya if you are the United States is the Atlantic Ocean and the absence of a real driving interest such as self defense that would lead Americans to support a war with Libya. In order to goad Americans into a war with Libya, the best hope for doing so is to wave bloody shirts at them and somehow convince them that Libyans are going to blow them up at any time now unless we go to war with Libya ASAP. Facebook and the rest of them don't have a duty to simultaneously prevent the wrong people from viewing Ogrish-style execution videos while also preserving them. So they want Americans to be radicalized in favor of war against Syria and Libya (causing far more deaths than the typical radicalization which just results in teens posting lots of pepe memes), but not radicalized in favor of Islamic terrorists. That is just an impossible propaganda requirement that cannot be met.
SR-71_Blackbird 7y ago
I’m sorry, but this article lost my interest by the opening sub-heading. Algorithms that take down “terrorist” videos could hamstring efforts to bring human-rights abusers to justice. “hamstring”? WTF.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

587 points by anfilt 7y ago

caprese 7y ago

Hit them with obstruction of justice until they have to exit the market entirely

differentView 7y ago
They're not in the war crime evidence storage market.
- djakjxnanjak 7y ago
  Facebook disseminates propaganda: war crime! Facebook deletes evidence of atrocities: war crime!
  - caprese 7y ago
    Yes thats the point Make it impossible for them to operate in this market
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rlt 7y ago

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

yoz-y 7y ago
This. It is simply not possible to have these platforms host this kind of content and it boils down to money. If you want Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the likes you need ads. Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. If people were ready to pay for a platform with "raw" footage of others' lives there could be a place for it. So far the market has proven otherwise.
- 0xADEADBEE 7y ago
  An interesting take on a place where they did their best to accommodate is Slate Star Codex's Culture War thread on Reddit [0]. I've wrestled with this for a while but as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter become ubiquitous, forcing views contrary to internal ones off the platforms is wildly irresponsible. On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. I do agree it's money-driven but it doesn't work long-term; it's an interesting problem and I hope a phase of maturity comes soon because it's not as if alternative views can just set up their own platforms [1]. [0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread... [1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/gab-is-down-as-godaddy-paypal-pull-service-following-synagogue-shooting/ https://www.cnet.com/news/gab-is-down-as-godaddy-paypal-pull...
  - naasking 7y ago
    > On the other hand, I don't see why I, as a platform, should host content I find objectionable. So you shouldn't have to provide services to people you find objectionable, even if those people are in a protected class? It's a common but mistaken belief that we have no obligations to society or to our fellow citizens. For hosting specifically, it depends on multiple factors: your ubiquity, the demographics of your audience, the intended/stated purpose, etc. For instance, the Supreme Court recently decided unanimously that social media is the public square, and so no law can restrict access to social media (they were trying to ban sex offenders from social media). Considering Twitter's and Facebook's stated purposes are to become the place for all online conversation and debate, if they achieve that goal then censoring content arguably violates people's rights. Doubly so because people like Jack Conte have literally stated that access to social media is a human right.
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
      It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time. In this case, the Supreme Court made it clear that governments cannot prevent people from using social media. However other Supreme Court decisions have it that property owners don't have to allow others to use their property for speech, except in unusual cases like company towns. It's not obvious to me that they will find these two ideas to be in conflict.
mattlondon 7y ago
Yep. What do people want? First everyone goes crazy that people can find stuff on these platforms, then they go crazy that you can't. I find all this pinning of the world's problems on Facebook/Twitter/Google irritating. Sure they have a lot to answer for, but it's not like propaganda, censorship, or media manipulation did not exist before. Sigh. I guess they are an easy target to pick on.
- ghjjjj 7y ago
  “First everyone goes crazy that people can find stuff on these platforms, ” I don’t. I get crazy when effectively censor at the behest of (any) government under the “we’re private” excuse. I’m perfectly consistent about this. That and our imperative need to break apart the big tech companies (and bank, but that’s a different question)
  - naasking 7y ago
    > I get crazy when effectively censor at the behest of (any) government under the “we’re private” excuse. It's depressing how quickly people are willing to throw away the civil and human rights that have taken millennia to win. Let's hope it doesn't take actual violence to remind people of the difference between speech and violence. We haven't had real physical strife and a world war in our generation to keep this distinction fresh in our minds.
    - cr0sh 7y ago
      > We haven't had real physical strife and a world war in our generation to keep this distinction fresh in our minds. Don't worry, we're doing our best to make it happen, give it time, we'll get there! /the nice thing is, the next world war after that will only involve sticks and stones...
    - mattlondon 7y ago
      > We haven't had real physical strife Perhaps not in the west. There has been significant physical strife for millions of people in Africa and the middle east for some time that shows no real sign of ending any time soon.

behringer 7y ago

I'm not interested in seeing war crimes on facebook. If you want to disseminate that stuff, use a public forum where that stuff is welcome. There are countless places. Facebook and the spin users give is not welcome by me and no doubt by others.

wnoise 7y ago
Facebook is millions, if not billions of tiny public forums. The problem is that people seem to want them all to have the same standards. If you don't want stuff like this on your wall or feed, it's easy to keep out. If the admins of a group don't want this showing up, they too can filter it out. But people seem to be demanding that not only do they not have to see content they dislike, but that no one else can either.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  It's the nature of censorship that people want to censor what other people see, not what they see themselves. We believe we're able to make our own decisions and we're in control of our minds, but those other people who aren't us might not be and are in danger of bad influences.
  - mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
    Speak for yourself. People who support censorship, sure. "We"? No.
    - lopmotr 7y ago
      By "we", I mean most people, as evidenced by all democratic governments censoring various things, presumably because their voters want to prevent the rest of their country from seeing them. Same goes for restrictions on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc. People who're concerned about their health won't be doing those things themselves and don't need a law to stop them, but they want to protect what they see as irresponsible other people. That might be a fair judgement but it's still a judgement about other people being somehow weaker and needing to be protected from themselves.

o10449366 7y ago

This article seems mostly concerned about Facebook and YouTube's opaque filtering systems, but the authors are looking in the wrong place. These platforms aren't and shouldn't be responsible for hosting violent and disturbing content - regardless of its purpose or utility. The authors themselves discuss the can of worms that open when you start accommodating the interests of some groups and not others; it isn't sustainable and it isn't possible. Instead, this article should have focused less on the decisions of AI systems and neural networks, which can be difficult to decipher and interpret, and more on the decisions of the humans behind these tech companies. The latter is much easier to scrutinize and dissect. I think the truly concerning initiatives are projects like Google's Dragonfly. There's absolutely nothing opaque about a search engine that will actively assist the Chinese government with whitewashing history for a billion individuals. These are the decisions that should be examined.

djakjxnanjak 7y ago
>Instead, this article should have focused less on the decisions of AI systems and neural networks, which can be difficult to decipher and interpret, and more on the decisions of the humans behind these tech companies. The latter is much easier to scrutinize and dissect. I agree with your comment overall but this common assumption bothers me. We can put a debugger in a neural net, we can’t put one in a human brain. People get angry when a policy decision is made that targets them, and are told by that the people responsible that the decision was implemented with a neural net. Then they get mad at the neural net, which shifts blame away from the humans who control it.

leshokunin 7y ago

The problem is that we've equated some platforms with a certain kind of media. Youtube is video, Twitter is news, Facebook is.. reality tv, I dunno. It's pretty debatable whether those platforms are the right place for the coverage of war crimes. I'm not going to start an argument about the media not doing their job right. However, this discussion would be moot if there was a news platform on par with the above, and I don't mean Twitter. I'd love to see someone build or modernize a news outlet that isn't driven by attention or clicks as a currency.

bilbo0s 7y ago
This. If your evidence for war crimes is Twitter, there's a problem. And the problem is not Twitter. Twitter and Facebook posts should not be evidence of anything. That stuff is so easily faked that courts would be entirely right to laugh such "evidence" out of the courtroom. Evidence should be gathered by appropriate authorities and kept in accordance with international standards on evidence storage. Hint: That's not "look at this tweet I got!"
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I guess the reason people put these things on social media is to raise awareness of it. The problem is that they fail to also send a copy to the relevant authorities.
- joeseeder 7y ago
  I think you are completely missing the point why they are ending up on these platforms... Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement. Most of the people these sharing atrocities are aware only about platforms we call social media. For them these are the only ways they know how to make it public, for the world to see and hope we will act.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Try to imagine a world where "appropriate authorities" do not exist, as a first step. Places where these materials get captured are not first world countries with respectable, recognised law enforcement... I've lived in these nations, and if you can send via internet to Twitter, you can send to the UN. In fact, you can send to both at the same time.

pergadad 7y ago

Very interesting article. Essentially: there is a legitimate need for such content, namely to hold the perpetrators accountable. So the question might be: how can this content still be accessed later by e.g. researchers/prosecutors/...? On the other hand that then opens the door for a dictator (we seem to have plenty of them nowadays) to ask for deletion of content and then use the stored materials still to identify e.g. regime critics. Really difficult issue.

hellllllllooo 7y ago

The issue with doing things at huge scale are all the edge cases. If Facebook wants to have all the benefits and money it gets from owning its huge network it also has the responsibility of having to treat different content with nuance. These kinds of issues are one reason why Facebook wants to move towards a more private network with more private interactions so it can avoid having to deal with the endless complexity of human interaction in public.

iscrewyou 7y ago

I just wish it was easy to turn their algorithms off. All these companies were good before those algorithms started. Like feed for Facebook & Twitter, recommendations for YouTube. That would solve a lot of problems. It would make sure people aren’t exposed to things unwillingly and these companies won’t be on the hook for it but it will also make sure things aren’t getting reported and taken down as much as they should (for law enforcement tracking purposes).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

intended 7y ago

What do people expect? Isn’t this uncharted territory for everyone? Everyone can report, but the public sphere where this happens is owned by a company which needs profit. Humanity was always insulated from what the worst that happened at that minute by the difficulty of transmitting information over older mediums. This means incentives are not aligned here - speaking the truth, keeping you engaged, and keeping Disney land clean. A person in the UK who wakes up in the morning doesn’t want to see evidence that South American violence has resulted in an entire village being eradicated. As a species We were insulated from thinking at species scale. We could do village and perhaps nation scale on and average human basis. A rare few people can think at a planetary or greater scale regularly. So how precisely should this be structured ?

psychoslave 7y ago
That's an interesting point regarding human cognition limits. Thanks to this comment I found Capacity limits of informationprocessing in the brain, by René Marois and Jason Ivanoff[1]. Intuitively I would think the gap of organizational difficulty between a village and nation be far more important than the one between a nation and the whole mankind. I mean that I would expect, a national organizational process to require far more logistic sophistication and far many more explicitly reproducible/scalable processes than what you need in a village. Of course, some of these processes can be argued as directly conflicting with a "mankind scale mindset", but it doesn't really seems to make a greater gap than one that isolate a mind in a smaller human scale. [1] http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/marois/Publications/Marois_Ivanoff-2005.pdf http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/marois/Publications/Ma...
naasking 7y ago
Excellent point. Arguably content targeting should consider geographic location (and it probably does to some extent). If we have to start categorizing content so we can preserve journalism with objectionable content, geographic scoring should get boosted even more.
marcosdumay 7y ago
That should be the top comment on this thread. > A person in the UK who wakes up in the morning doesn’t want to see evidence that South American violence has resulted in an entire village being eradicated. And really, why should they? It's not like they can do anything over the issue. They can get the abstract news and go live their lives. Yet, it's extremely important that some people get the evidence, and those are specific people, but distributed geographically and culturally so that I have no idea how to identify them.

nunez 7y ago

Aren’t sites like LiveLeak better for this kind of content? Won’t this kind of content make it there anyway?

lopmotr 7y ago
It could be ordinary people using what they're familiar with. If an emergency suddenly happens, who's going to spend half an hour dicking around researching what site to use and going through their signup procedure and installing their app and all that?
deleted 7y ago
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subjoriented 7y ago

The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign influence campaigns typically attempt to magnify grassroots dissenting opinions (this is true also of US foreign intelligence efforts). There's many reasons why these kinds of apps, comments, and conversations are taken down due to their content. Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform. Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well. It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades. It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.

ehnto 7y ago
Australia lacks safe harbour laws which the US has had for some time. This has a chilling effect on certain types of platforms. Even something like a photo hosting site is very risk heavy in Australia as the type of content on your servers is your responsibility. I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms start moderating more and more. Now, I am all in favour of moderation. Real life communities are moderated, and all the strongest online communities have some kind of moderation. But there needs to be protections for companies who are moderating the best they can and still have evil content on the site. Else these platforms won't be sustainable and will be in heavy legal risk to boot. They won't make much sense anymore.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

The podcast episode "post no evil" about Facebooks moderation problems, covers something very similar where during the Mexican border drug wars people were posting images of dead bodies hung from overpassed and shootouts. Facebook had internal debates over whether this counted as news or breached content guidelines I recommend the podcast greatly. But perhaps we need a simpler approach - a funded "journalism" archive where the tech firms can shift the posts to online storage (ie not delete it) but section it off for later analysis. Seems the only likely compromise.

medecau 7y ago
Something like the Internet Archive?
- jplayer01 7y ago
  Except nobody goes to the Internet Archive unless they're looking for something extremely specific. The benefit of Facebook as a platform is that you can reach a wide audience in a place where often going to the authorities means either jack squat or your incarceration or worse.
  - medecau 7y ago
    Sure. I meant to say the Internet Archive can be used as the 'funded "journalism" archive' that GP mentioned.
    - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
      I did think that was one possibility - but this needs to be funded and supported by the tech firms themselves not handed off and forgotten. I can imagine a way of referencing these redacted images that facebooks just puts up a big red sign and a warning - but that still allows people to find it and it acts as a full web citizen.
6nf 7y ago
And now Facebook is banning random harmless idiots like Paul Joseph Watson - for 'being a dangerous individual' even though he's clearly not a terrorist or whatever. It's insane.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

Of course the point I forgot to make is that we suddenly have access to all the world's evidence - that every good and bad issue around the globe is now passing through these forms data centres ... and we are not used to that. Our brains seem wired to weight bad news much more heavily. We need to remember Douglas Adams advice - "It's vitally important not to have a sense of perspective"

docker_up 7y ago

This sounds like a perfect reason why sites like LiveLeak exist. I don't know if I care that Facebook doesn't host videos that go against its TOS, but if sites like LiveLeak are forbidden from hosting these videos even though they want to, it would make me worried.

vokep 7y ago
This. Censor the mall (facebook, twitter) where families and your grandma hangout from stuff they would never want to see But let the wild west (liveleak, 4chan, etc) stay wild.

thereisnospork 7y ago

A thought experiment: If 9/11 had happened today, what would their policies mean for that footage? What should they do to censor it, if anything? Consider too the increase in camera density over the past two decades.

BirWebDesign 7y ago

Damn them all. God, let them all be devastated.

happytreefrens 7y ago

These tech companies decide, often in unison, to deplatform people, types of legal content, or political views. There is clearly coordination among news outlets, social media companies, and tech companies (everything from payment processors to web hosting). Who is doing this coordination? To what end? Is there a common thread in the deplatforming, smearing, and silencing campaigns?

AstralStorm 7y ago
There need not be a single "who" behind it in as much as a set of convergent processes with the same goal of control and power. It is coordination of the kind of "going after the Joneses", because Chinese get away with it and gave useful results, so can we, ethics and long term effects be damned.
cr0sh 7y ago
> to deplatform people, types of legal content, or political views. Who determines what is legal? What is legal in my country may not be in your's, and vice-versa. How do you decide what to show on an international media platform in such a case? Neither? Both? Let the user decide? What if my (your's) government won't let me (you) decide? On political views, I'm not sure how to answer or correct this. History has shown humanity that there are certain political views which are very "sticky", in the sense that they answer to something deeper in the human psyche in a way that with the right leader(s), they can create and sustain mass followings that can play host to violence and atrocity of a frightening scale against those who don't adhere to such political (or social) views. Such political views have proven so horrifying, that certain parts of humanity has sought to stamp them out before they take hold again, to "nip them in the bud" before they even gain any kind of ground. But the internet has proven to be fertile soil in which such views can hide and proliferate. This is at odds with the want to allow freedom of speech and information. Such views are akin to "fighting words" or "yelling 'fire' in a theater" where such a danger doesn't exist. But they a honestly worse than that; in certain ways, such views can become and border on cultish and religious behaviour. I could perhaps make parallels between a certain religion and a certain government of ancient times, but I'm sure you can see that (it was all politics, and it continues to play out to this day). Is it better if we just let these views proliferate, let their political voice get louder, let them influence others until what was an atrocity committed by them becomes a lawfully executed act, as they gain political power and control? Do we just let these views and the people behind them grow and grow, until another world war ensues? Because that's where it leads. We know this. We've seen it play out multiple times in the past. Which is why such wide "censorship" occurs. At the same time, I don't know whether I really agree with it or not. Right now, it's considered legal because the internet is not considered a "place" or a "public sphere". It's just a bunch of interconnected privately owned networks for the most part, and we've voted in politicians (not everywhere or worldwide of course) that want and have kept it that way. It's strange, here in the United States with the current federal government; the party mostly in power, or who came into power, put in place people in the FCC (Pai) who virtually killed off net neutrality, and also (Pai and long before him, via ALEC laws pandered to city/state governments, most in control by the same party) made it virtually impossible for "public internet", or even third-parties outside the almost monopoly of cable and telephone providers to give better or public service of the internet to people. In other words, this party has lobbied and pulled the strings hard in order to keep the internet tightly and corporately controlled, fully private, blocking public access or "transport" on the lines. Yet certain people of that same party are now complaining when views they espouse (or maybe silently agree with) are being "suppressed" due to market forces and such on that same private network. It's a classic (and dumb) case of "wanting your cake and eating it too". If they really wanted their views to be allowed freer reign, they should have pushed for full net neutrality and for public and open infrastructure for carrying broadband for everyone. Make it cheap, make it equitable, make it easy to access. Unfortunately, they know this will also allow other views, potentially views they don't agree with, to also be voiced, and they don't want that, either. Sigh.

8bitsrule 7y ago

Social media have successfully created the illusion that they are (to some extent, at least) public spaces. This is another reminder that they are not. OTOH, truly public spaces on the internet ... where reasonable speech can truly be free ... are in very short supply. By accident or intention, this is a crappy state of affairs. This isn't a new topic. 20 years ago, Lessig wrote, "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear." https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/arts/adding-up-the-costs-of-cyberdemocracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/02/arts/adding-up-the-costs-... If our free speech is limited only to the inside walls of walled gardens, that's not their fault.

cr0sh 7y ago
> OTOH, truly public spaces on the internet ... where reasonable speech can truly be free ... are in very short supply. Who decides what is "reasonable"? One's person or group's "reasonable" is another's call to regulation, if not censorship by various means. How can this conundrum be solved on an international network composed of both adults and children accessing the same content? I'm not expecting you or anyone else to chime in with a solution; I obviously don't have one myself. But ultimately, this information hydra we've created will need taming in some manner, or it may eat the world alive.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  Who decides? Good question. But IMO, democracy is not the strong suit of most corporations. Here in the US, back in the fabled wild west, the solution was not to expect the law to be upheld by grocers, blacksmiths, or bankers. The public hired professionals. So, I reckon, maybe we need some laws to enforce.

Quanttek 7y ago

I've noticed that myself as I'm analyzing influential public statements with regards to the Rohingya for my Bachelor thesis on their discrimination and genocide. Unfortunately, Facebook was one of the biggest channels for dehumanizing and incendiary content but this is all gone now. I think FB should at least provide researchers access to an archive of removed content.

msiyer 7y ago

Is this really a technology problem? Are we so naive that we believe these things were not happening in the past? This problem cannot be solved in the consciousness we currently exist in. The people running the world and those who ought to run it are entirely different.

deanclatworthy 7y ago

These platforms can do no right. If Facebook/Youtube leave a video online of a beheading of John Smith from <Country X> then <Country X> inevitably calls them out for promoting and hosting this "illegal" content. Now, they're being chastised for taking it down too. Maybe, just maybe, these companies have internal processes for handing over such materials to the relevant authorities, and don't need to rely on armchair detectives to investigate war crimes.

AstralStorm 7y ago
The actual question is if the process is used to silence lies or uncomfortable truth. Or more Machiavellian, shape the discourse in ways favorable to rulers without regard to either. These processes are ran by greedy people, not out of anyone's goodwill.
megous 7y ago
Ok, what these processes are, and where are they docummented? Because I seriously doubt they exist. I've certainly not read any articles about tech companies having any such thing, and actually helping researchers and archiving organizations. Also there's no jurisdiction or relevant authorities for many war zones. So archiving and docummenting is the only option now, to help potential investigations and trials in the future.
Xelbair 7y ago
Maybe, just maybe, we can decide if content platforms are responsible for user content or not.. and stick to that decision. Quite frankly i am against any form of censorship.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  Let's say you make users responsible for the content they create; how do you intend to enforce that? Country A's User B uploads Content C that User D in Country E find's objectionable, or in Country E is illegal to view or possess, while in Country A is perfectly legal. How do you enforce that? Labels or tags aren't the answer, because Content C could be labeled/tagged as X,Y,Z where X,Y,Z are orthogonal to the content, and bear no relation to it. Do you allow it to be viewed by User D, and if it isn't legal, then put that on User D to be responsible to...what? Unview it? More than a few of these problems are all because we humans have decided without consensus or agreement that some information is "bad" while other information is "good", and even that "good" information is only viewable by certain people of that group who meet a certain age requirement. All of it is very arbitrary, and at odds with itself on the world stage. This issue won't be solved easily, if at all. Instead, we'll likely just continue to make more convoluted laws that can't be followed and/or all descend into totalitarian walled garden states isolated from each other while atrocities continue behind those walls, telling each other within that "we're the free and prosperous ones; those over there are not". Why does this narrative seem so damn familiar...?

stef25 7y ago

Couldn't they take down the content but keep it available for neutral third parties to evaluate and collect? There has to be a better way to collect evidence of war crimes than leaving decapitation videos visible on social media for all to see. Maybe the ICC could even launch their own platform where this kind of content can be submitted.

jplayer01 7y ago
You don't think there's value in people seeing what horrible things are being committed? If we reduce "news" to the words on a newspaper page or the heavily curated images in a TV news report, who's ever going to give a shit about anything?
megous 7y ago
Removed videos need not be graphic. War crimes take many forms. Bombings of hospitals and schools. Mass shellings of cities. Destruction of vital infrastructure, etc. You'll not see any blood or torn bodies. It will just expose lies of some nation state's propaganda. These kinds of videos get removed too. Either directly or indirectly by banning the entire account, if it posts more videos that are questionable - which is likely. Or because of targetting by trolls using false complaints. Though I'm not that worried. Many people already know the perils of YouTube, and archive everything at first sight. It just serves the nation state's propaganda, that is usually left untouched, because it's served via more official media channels.

onesmallcoin 7y ago

We couldn't have started the discussion of systematic censorship in a better way It's hard to come up with one rule that works for everyone It's normal to have a knee jerk response to censor something if what your looking at is terrible and you wouldn't want other people to see the bad thing, but it is also important that we as a race try to learn from our mistakes; and censorship straight to deletion is burning the evidence. This may fall short of crazy talk around here: But maybe we need a human element in the curation of our digital libary, and a way for society as a whole to have input on this process, not just in removing the offending content; but also in keeping track of it too help people to be accountable for their actions. Full Disclosure: I'm also a resident of christchurch, new zealand where the mosque shooting happened recently I saw our goverment block multiple websites via DNS, in a country where this kind pf censorship is otherwise unheard of: We honestly didn't know if the systems were in place for this kind of censorship. So my 2c is that if you are in a five-eyes nation, they almost certainly have the capacity to conduct this kind of attack.

Quequau 7y ago

Surely there's a difference between not publishing (to the general public) on their platform and not making such content available to the relevant authorities.

cf141q5325 7y ago

This is a very serious issue by far not limited to facebook and youtube. The problem goes much further then private companies not wanting the content on their site. Its very much motivated by a push of governments to purge terrorism propaganda and stuff that could be used to radicalize people. The best example is, or better was, reddits /r/syriancivilwar. The subreddit collected all and every information available on the conflict, from every side. This brought them in direct conflict with reddit admins, who banned multiple users for linking to terrorism propaganda, namely ISIS videos and AMAQ statements, the ISIS news agency. The subbredit is now a shell of its former self because its reduced to a propaganda platform for factions which are socially acceptable, instead of a place to document the war and its atrocities. It however doesnt stop there. The content wasnt hosted at reddit but literally anywhere where there is a hope it might not be immediately taken down. From piracy favored streaming services to archiv.org mirrors. Which all get taken down for distributing terrorism propaganda instead of violating the TOS. When you hear about terrorism propaganda, there is a good chance we are talking about not just evidence of warcrimes, but also material that is important to understand how people can get radicalized. And how to counter that propaganda. People at risk of radicalization can still access the material while the public as a whole looses the insight into the mind of those people entirely. And the people at risk drift off into echo chambers. And for a lack of information we are doing nothing to counter that propaganda, quite the opposite. I doubt the media at large could have done ISIS a bigger favor by their coverage of focusing simply on the barbarism of the videos. They missed the point entirely, the barbarism was very much a part of ISIS propaganda. The reporting was great for getting views, but only reenforced the people who already entered the echochambers. And hoping on a purely military solution sounds absolutely naive to me. Its very much a task for society as a whole to watch out that people dont drop into those echo chambers and get radicalized. Framing this issue as "AI gone wrong" misses the point entirely. The content would also have been deleted by a human. And with the given political development, its not overly pessimistic to assume that people publicly hosting content will be forced to remove any such content immediately or face prosecution. Which only helps with getting reelected for signaling to combat terrorism instead of actually doing anything against terrorism. Not to sound overly pessimistic, but the situation looks really dire to me. I had hoped that we as a society had learned our lesson about book burning. And the issue is not a new one. Mein Kampf is still not readily available in Germany for the "fear that it might turn people into nazis". Serdar Sommuncu made the only reasonable thing here and started touring Germany reading from Mein Kampf as well as famous propaganda speeches to show how ridiculous they are. There is nothing special about them. There isnt some hidden insight in those books that turn people into Nazis. But our treatment of them might convince people at risk that there has to be something about them, or they wouldnt be banned in the first place. I fear very much the same development from the array of far right terrorists with their manifests. Instead of the rambling of lunatics they are it gets treated as something that is dangerous as it apparently might convince people.

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Digit-Al 7y ago

So, here's an idea. Let's take the case of YouTube, instead of its algorithm deleting this content, how about it is marked with a flag. Normal users are completely unable to view, or even know of the existence of content marked with this flag. It doesn't come up in searches and even a direct link will just show some "content unavailable" message. Human rights groups and the like can request permission for a designated user to have a "special administrator" permission. Anyone with that permission will see a permission toggle when they look at someone's user account. That toggle will allow them to give or revoke permission to view these "forbidden" videos. That will then allows these organisations to give access to anyone they deem suitable to help them police these videos. There would need to be some sort of safeguards to make sure that permission is not accidentally given to a minor or something. This should solve a lot of the problems I reckon. Thoughts?

yters 7y ago
Yes, some sort of tiered access seems better than mass deletion. However, I'm sure all these videos still exist somewhere in backup. I doubt they are really deleted.
toxicFork 7y ago
How do you sell this to YouTube or enforce this on them, to first accept then prioritise this functionality? What benefits do they gain or what alternatives do they avoid, as a company for profit?
jeandejean 7y ago
Why would Human rights groups be entitled to have this censorship privilege? So they'd decide now what's good or bad to display on Youtube? If anyone needs evidence, it is Justice prosecutors and it is likely already possible. Deleted from user-facing Youtube and Facebook and the like doesn't mean it's deleted from their storage... Plus the title is misleading: they're not deleting evidence of war crimes, they're deleting upsetting and distressing videos from their open platform, and that's a good thing! Nothing proves they don't already pass these videos to law enforcement.
- 7y ago

v_lisivka 7y ago

Number looks very little, if compared to Russia backing. Russia has whole TV channels backed by FSB, whole troll fabrics, and their own agents even in major Western media. Why few orders of magnitude greater effort cannot help Russia, while much smaller effort helps USA a lot?

gdy 7y ago
"Number looks very little, if compared to Russia backing. Russia has whole TV channels backed by FSB, whole troll fabrics, and their own agents even in major Western media." [Citation needed]
- v_lisivka 7y ago
  See https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ About EU vs Disinformation campaign This website is part of a campaign to better forecast, address and respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation. The ‘EU versus Disinformation’ campaign is run by the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force. The team was set up after the EU Heads of State and Government stressed the need to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns in March 2015.
  - gdy 7y ago
    You could have as well given a link to google.com. You have made several specific russophobic claims and I challenge you to substatiate them and not leave that as 'an exercise for the reader'.
    - v_lisivka 7y ago
      These claims are not russophobic. We are at war with Russian Federation for 5 years. It's clearly demonstrates that we have no phobia. They are anti-russian. Please, list claims you are interested to dig in.
      - gdy 7y ago

notOnUrBestDay 7y ago

Wow. What the fuck do you want me to do about it? Care?

basetop 7y ago

Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic. Youtube, facebook, reddit, google search, etc have all been targeted by the atlantic, nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc and bullied into scrubbing content and direct their users to "authoritative sources". Ironically enough, in china, russia and most countries, "authoritative sources" are state propaganda organs. But we are different or so I'm told. Our "authoritative sources" are independent news organizations who strangely enough push the same message with the same talking points. What a coincidence. For "independent" "news" organizations, they sure are united in the same message. This censorship has been going on for at least 5 years now. Maybe the atlantic journalists should investigate their editors as to why the atlantic has supported censorship? Or maybe the atlantic journalists should start investigating nytimes, washingtonpost, cnn, etc. Why so many government/intelligence agency people are working in media. Why so many children of politicians ( Bushes, Clintons, McCains, Cuomos, etc ) have prominent positions in the media? Or is the atlantic only interested in war crime evidence that suit their agenda ( pushing for war in syria, venezuela, etc )? This article is so weird. It's like an arsonist setting a house on fire and telling everyone that the house is on fire.

candiodari 7y ago
> Tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes and everything else at the behest of media companies like the atlantic. Don't underestimate governments forcing these companies to hide evidence of their own misdeeds. Even governments that you wouldn't traditionally think of as abusive. Take for yourself what a realistic number is for police abuse and then how much gets filmed and uploaded. Then search on Youtube. Clearly, someone's asking for removals in the US. Same for Europe. I doubt very much it's the Atlantic doing that.
brightball 7y ago
Stuff like this is why I still see value in own encyclopedias, history books, etc. I simply don't trust resources that can be edited/deleted at any time.
- dorfsmay 7y ago

Nasrudith 7y ago

To be frank tech companies are a second order symptom of fucked up societal attitudes pushing the censorship. The puritan mass market push towards "child friendly mass market" as a default which leaves no place for the ugliness of reality. They don't care about suffering - they just don't want to see it. It is narcissistic sociopathy as a norm - how dare they run out of a burning building in their underwear! Children might see them! That it is the middle of the night is no concern - they don't want "inappropriate content" in a back alley. They want it gone. The tech companies tend towards doing nothing until the masses of "think of the children" complaints about "objectionable" content. The absence of those masses of people is what I miss the most about the internet not being mainstream. I personally believe what we need is to offend those busybodies as much as possible until they fuck off into their own bubble.

indigochill 7y ago
>The absence of those masses of people is what I miss the most about the internet not being mainstream. I've seen this sentiment before, but I don't get it. Sure, the internet's mainstream and there are parts of it that have a mainstream culture and that's probably not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. But the internet itself has no culture (heh). It's just a network. There are still corners of the internet that have whatever culture you're looking for. And if you can't find it, you can make it. It probably won't make much money or make the news, but the option is there. That said, I agree with the main thrust of your argument that tech companies are just reflecting the mainstream preference to whitewash reality.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  The sentiment is based on the transformative and displacing effects of the mainstream and "old internet" refers to culture as opposed to the network. I am well aware that niche chasing is the way to achieve it for now. What the sentiment longs for as ideal is for influence to have worked more in the opposite direction. Instead we get advertisers trying to be the tail wagging the dog again when people left their last venture over the blandness they imposed.

indigochill 7y ago

Stratechery had an article that I think provides a reasonable compromise for displaying and taking responsibility of content some might find objectionable but which others would argue has value. It involves the poster being responsible and owning the consequences for the content as opposed to some third party platform which has to try to please opposing sides. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-internet/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-...

weego 7y ago

It's not evidence, at best it is hearsay. We have no way to validate truth from fiction.

j-c-hewitt 7y ago

I think the whole notion of war as a whodunnit crime is pretty moronic at a fundamental level. #1, you don't have jurisdiction. #2, if you hoped to gain jurisdiction, the most important thing is not piecing together the facts of the case, but winning the war. If you want to go after the Libyan National Army for doing bad things, you have to go to war with Libya and defeat their army. The trouble with going to war with Libya if you are the United States is the Atlantic Ocean and the absence of a real driving interest such as self defense that would lead Americans to support a war with Libya. In order to goad Americans into a war with Libya, the best hope for doing so is to wave bloody shirts at them and somehow convince them that Libyans are going to blow them up at any time now unless we go to war with Libya ASAP. Facebook and the rest of them don't have a duty to simultaneously prevent the wrong people from viewing Ogrish-style execution videos while also preserving them. So they want Americans to be radicalized in favor of war against Syria and Libya (causing far more deaths than the typical radicalization which just results in teens posting lots of pepe memes), but not radicalized in favor of Islamic terrorists. That is just an impossible propaganda requirement that cannot be met.

SR-71_Blackbird 7y ago

I’m sorry, but this article lost my interest by the opening sub-heading. Algorithms that take down “terrorist” videos could hamstring efforts to bring human-rights abusers to justice. “hamstring”? WTF.

deleted 7y ago

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