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> But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue (..) They kept reposting it again and again and again. Seems like it should be pretty
by comboy 7y ago
> But as the weeks went on, the video continued to reappear in his queue (..) They kept reposting it again and again and again.
Seems like it should be pretty "easy" to spot similar videos and audio (even after some modifications) given how great dataset all those moderators are providing.
I'm pretty sure there are some pretty smart folks working at fb, so it would mean that given accuracy standards it's still cheaper for them to hire humans to do the job.
- dillonmckay 7y agoNo, that is only to protect IP rights.
- comboy 7y agoI don't understand, can you elaborate? What difference does it make if a duplicate is spotted by a human vs by a machine?
- cldellow 7y agoIf Facebook repeatedly permits copyright infringement on the same video, they might get sued by the rightsholder, which might be a very wealthy company with experience enforcing its rights in courts. In they repeatedly make a $30,000/year employee view 15 seconds of the same child being beaten to a pulp (...the minimum time they are obligated to watch each clip before rendering a judgment), the employee will just quit after their health declines past a certain point. So while the technology could be applied to both contexts, there's probably a lot more economic incentive to apply it to the first context than the second one.
- thecatspaw 7y agoWouldnt it be more economically viable to use it also for moderation? What is the point of making an employee watch the same video again, when they could instead moderate another video?
- cldellow 7y agoI don't know! It's conjecture in the first place. I assume _some_ ML is used - presumably (hopefully!) not all stuff that goes to moderators is because of a human flag, some of it is an ML model. I can imagine, though, that there may be odd asymmetries that would encourage dumping the problem on to a contractor work force. - The contractor work force is a fixed cost. Even if it seems high (the article quotes $100,000,000/year), this is (a) a known number you can budget around and (b) perhaps cheaper than spinning up a multi-disciplinary team to adapt ML models to solve the problem. - The detection-for-copyright case may have more people co-operating. Rightsholders have a strong economic incentive to directly work with you to provide you with fingerprints of their copyrighted material that you can use to train a model. Trolls and bad actors aren't going to give you such a heads up, so you'll still need a contractor work force for the foreseeable future. - This stuff is toxic. You can't underline that enough. Kiddie porn, gore, animal cruelty, conspiracy theories. Outsourcing it serves at least two purposes: you can blame the contractors for any problems and you keep it far from your core employees who are expensive to hire, train and retain, who may start to ask tough questions about the unwitting-if-not-unpredictable role Facebook plays in distributing this content to people.
- akerro 7y agoMachine learning for recognizing duplicates is only for "protection of IP rights", not for protection of low wage workers. Apparently somebody at facebook decided that ML is more expensive than low wage human worker rejecting the same material over and over. Layers are more expensive and bring more bad media coverage than someones suicide in 3rd world country.
- Buttons840 7y agoThat part of the article says they allowed the video of animal abuse to remain visible so that law enforcement could do something about it. Of course, that's bullshit for many reasons. Ban the user and the video, if the same video is posted again, autoban it. If the user is law-enforcent, allow them to see the details of all related content that was banned. There are neat things called if-statemets that could do that.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoYeah, I mean Facebook can open up a portal for all local and national police precincts and law enforcement that goes "This is the content that our systems and content moderators marked as illegal, this is the exact location, date, time it was recorded, our facial recognition software identified these and these individuals", etc. However, I just also described how Facebook could easily be used in a dystopian police state fashion. I am fairly sure they aren't allowed to proactively report crimes. And that law enforcement would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reports coming in all at once.
- Buttons840 7y agoAllegedly they are already altering their behavior to assist law enforcement. I'm not suggesting they put a lot of effort into helping, but being able to remove a video from the general public without stopping law enforcent investigations seems reasonable.