9 ms·

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

by rlt 7y ago

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.
      - naasking 7y ago
        They might not. Then again, aren't Twitter and Facebook essentially company towns in the online world? If they are so ubiquitous that you must join these platforms to participate in modern political debate, that seems pretty darn close to qualifying.
        yoz-y 7y ago
        These platforms have became a sort of super states with citizens from all around the world. A single nation's definition of what is acceptable or not is hard to apply to the platform as a whole.
        naasking 7y ago
        Does it need to be applied to the platform as a whole? I imagine they already target content based on geolocating the IP requesting the content. Even the ad tier status can be geo-specific.
- happytreefrens 7y ago
  There is a market for a lot of kinds of content, but companies will gladly exchange some of their profit to push to silence certain kinds of messages and to keep competitors down. There's clearly a market for an uncensored social media network, but Gab has been deplatformed from payment processors, web hosts, registrars... Companies that refuse service to Gab will gladly host degenerate pornography and turn a blind eye to illegal activity. Much of this censorship cannot be chalked up to profit motive, and the only conclusion is ideological drive or collusion with other tech companies to help insure their respective monopolies and duopolies.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    So far almost all private censorship I've seen can be chalked up to profit motive. Payment processors don't like adult content not because they're prudes, but because there's a significantly increased risk of chargebacks, so why bother. Enabling illegal activities while maintaining plausible deniability and making easy profit off it? Why companies wouldn't do that? On the other hand, being a neutral platform is only fun until the Twitter mob notices you, after which you can choose between losing neutrality or getting painted as a bad actor on the front page of newspapers (sometimes you get the latter anyway, which incentivizes others to abandon neutrality preemptively). And even if you don't care, advertisers do care, because getting a mass-market product ad next to politically incorrect content may cause them issues with the Twitter mob and front page of the news.
  - dageshi 7y ago
    I think it's just simpler than that, it's risk. Some content has a known level of "bad" risk associated with it, legal pornography for instance, but other content potentially has a massive and unquantifiable downside almost to the point of being an existential threat to a platforms business. You can't force people to host content or be associated with hosting content which they fear will blow up in their faces.
- saulrh 7y ago
  Not even that. Half of the people want heavy-handed moderation to save the children. The other half are yelling about censorship. Every decision ends with the messenger getting shot.
  - makomk 7y ago
    Also, the two groups don't even seem to be on different sides, not really. Notice how this article doesn't have a single word of criticism for either the media articles decrying how terrible it is that tech companies allow violent and terrorist content to remain up, or the campaigns by major advertisers to pressure them to mass-censor all that content. It just pretends they didn't exist. The coverage of those campaigns by major media outlets was almost universally supportive. It's like the press are intentionally setting up a catch-22 for major tech companies, who coincidentally are eating into their profits and power.
- naasking 7y ago
  > Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. There are ways to mitigate this. For instance, ad spots in non-controversial content is a premium marketing tier. No one wants ad spots in very controversial material, so that would be a cheap tier. Advertisers only get associated with safe/pablum content if they're willing to pay for that assurance, or they get more widespread coverage in more controversial content if they're unwilling to pay. Controversy is inferred from like/dislike ratios and/or content reports, all of which is user-driven. Some threshold of user ratings would be needed before content is monetized, a threshold that crosses echo chambers, which is a classification amenable to machine learning. So this results in user-driven content classification and pricing tier driven ad placements, all without requiring any moderation or censorship on Google's part.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > Controversy is inferred from like/dislike ratios and/or content reports, all of which is user-driven. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't think it will be as simple as you think. For instance, it's possible for a community to develop that thinks certain content is just fine, while another community does not, but is unaware of the first community or its content. Then they suddenly through some mechanism become aware - and brigade the other community, stirring up controversy. Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored, in order to drive their own narrative (which they may not be followers of either - ie, imposing some fake narrative or content on a community they don't believe in, in order to remove content they have no problem with, because of the lulz - seriously, there are some very weird, very toxic people out there who have found each other and do this all the time). That's just one example I've thought of - the ways to game the system and cause problems with it are innumerable. I don't think this problem is something we will be able to fix as easily as that.
    - naasking 7y ago
      > Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored But that's just it, I'm suggesting that legal content is never censored, merely that the monetization is proportional to the controversy, because advertiser skittishness is the real problem causing censorship on these free platforms. So brigading to raise the controversy score would move its ad revenue to a lower tier, but it wouldn't get removed. Perhaps brigading would become a problem, but you leave it to the person whose channel was impacted to request a manual review if they suspect brigading. The review requirements have now shrunk dramatically. There may be ways to abuse this too, but I think the spirit of this approach is right.
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.

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

by rlt 7y ago

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

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.
    - naasking 7y ago
      They might not. Then again, aren't Twitter and Facebook essentially company towns in the online world? If they are so ubiquitous that you must join these platforms to participate in modern political debate, that seems pretty darn close to qualifying.
      - yoz-y 7y ago
        These platforms have became a sort of super states with citizens from all around the world. A single nation's definition of what is acceptable or not is hard to apply to the platform as a whole.
        naasking 7y ago
        Does it need to be applied to the platform as a whole? I imagine they already target content based on geolocating the IP requesting the content. Even the ad tier status can be geo-specific.
happytreefrens 7y ago
There is a market for a lot of kinds of content, but companies will gladly exchange some of their profit to push to silence certain kinds of messages and to keep competitors down. There's clearly a market for an uncensored social media network, but Gab has been deplatformed from payment processors, web hosts, registrars... Companies that refuse service to Gab will gladly host degenerate pornography and turn a blind eye to illegal activity. Much of this censorship cannot be chalked up to profit motive, and the only conclusion is ideological drive or collusion with other tech companies to help insure their respective monopolies and duopolies.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  So far almost all private censorship I've seen can be chalked up to profit motive. Payment processors don't like adult content not because they're prudes, but because there's a significantly increased risk of chargebacks, so why bother. Enabling illegal activities while maintaining plausible deniability and making easy profit off it? Why companies wouldn't do that? On the other hand, being a neutral platform is only fun until the Twitter mob notices you, after which you can choose between losing neutrality or getting painted as a bad actor on the front page of newspapers (sometimes you get the latter anyway, which incentivizes others to abandon neutrality preemptively). And even if you don't care, advertisers do care, because getting a mass-market product ad next to politically incorrect content may cause them issues with the Twitter mob and front page of the news.
- dageshi 7y ago
  I think it's just simpler than that, it's risk. Some content has a known level of "bad" risk associated with it, legal pornography for instance, but other content potentially has a massive and unquantifiable downside almost to the point of being an existential threat to a platforms business. You can't force people to host content or be associated with hosting content which they fear will blow up in their faces.
saulrh 7y ago
Not even that. Half of the people want heavy-handed moderation to save the children. The other half are yelling about censorship. Every decision ends with the messenger getting shot.
- makomk 7y ago
  Also, the two groups don't even seem to be on different sides, not really. Notice how this article doesn't have a single word of criticism for either the media articles decrying how terrible it is that tech companies allow violent and terrorist content to remain up, or the campaigns by major advertisers to pressure them to mass-censor all that content. It just pretends they didn't exist. The coverage of those campaigns by major media outlets was almost universally supportive. It's like the press are intentionally setting up a catch-22 for major tech companies, who coincidentally are eating into their profits and power.
naasking 7y ago
> Advertisers don't want to be displayed alongside gruesome content. There are ways to mitigate this. For instance, ad spots in non-controversial content is a premium marketing tier. No one wants ad spots in very controversial material, so that would be a cheap tier. Advertisers only get associated with safe/pablum content if they're willing to pay for that assurance, or they get more widespread coverage in more controversial content if they're unwilling to pay. Controversy is inferred from like/dislike ratios and/or content reports, all of which is user-driven. Some threshold of user ratings would be needed before content is monetized, a threshold that crosses echo chambers, which is a classification amenable to machine learning. So this results in user-driven content classification and pricing tier driven ad placements, all without requiring any moderation or censorship on Google's part.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > Controversy is inferred from like/dislike ratios and/or content reports, all of which is user-driven. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't think it will be as simple as you think. For instance, it's possible for a community to develop that thinks certain content is just fine, while another community does not, but is unaware of the first community or its content. Then they suddenly through some mechanism become aware - and brigade the other community, stirring up controversy. Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored, in order to drive their own narrative (which they may not be followers of either - ie, imposing some fake narrative or content on a community they don't believe in, in order to remove content they have no problem with, because of the lulz - seriously, there are some very weird, very toxic people out there who have found each other and do this all the time). That's just one example I've thought of - the ways to game the system and cause problems with it are innumerable. I don't think this problem is something we will be able to fix as easily as that.
  - naasking 7y ago
    > Heck, they could do this even if they weren't against the content, all for the purpose of having the content removed or otherwise censored But that's just it, I'm suggesting that legal content is never censored, merely that the monetization is proportional to the controversy, because advertiser skittishness is the real problem causing censorship on these free platforms. So brigading to raise the controversy score would move its ad revenue to a lower tier, but it wouldn't get removed. Perhaps brigading would become a problem, but you leave it to the person whose channel was impacted to request a manual review if they suspect brigading. The review requirements have now shrunk dramatically. There may be ways to abuse this too, but I think the spirit of this approach is right.

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.