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> "What they are doing is promoting an online slave market," said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery. > "If Google, Apple

> "What they are doing is promoting an online slave market," said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery. > "If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable." Of course we don't want social media enabling that. But the bad guys are the people who are keeping others as slaves, and the law enforcement that turn a blind eye. The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement. These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. A single dev could mock up a replacement, "like craigslist, but for slaves".

antocv 7y ago
Why can these apps block "breaking copyright" and discussions about piratebay, but cant stop slave trade? Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery? Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this. But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.
- api 7y ago
  Copyright infringement harms corporations with lobbyists. Slavery harms poor people.
  - __s 7y ago
    & yet copyright infringement goes on The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - api 7y ago
      I don't think the two are comparable at all. Labor is fundamentally scarce while copying or streaming media is almost free and not intrinsically limited.
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    And sadly, lots of rich folks with influence buy slaves. Look at what Epstein was doing. Where was he finding those he abused? There must have been a market. The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.
- aristophenes 7y ago
  I don't know why you are saying this, because all I did was say we should stop slavery. Whether or not we protect copyright or whatever, we definitely should stop slavery. Taking down a post isn't stopping slavery, it's insulating elite Westerners like myself from being aware that slavery is actually happening. Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    I really wonder what sort of information sources people are exposing themselves to for "slavery still exists, and tech platforms are used to facilitate it" to be a revelation. I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.
  - SllX 7y ago
    Last I heard, today’s global slave trade makes the Transatlantic Slave Trade at its peak look like a drop in the bucket. I don’t know if that comparison is accurate, but slavery never died in the world, it merely became illegal. https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-a-growing-global-scourge https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-...
- roenxi 7y ago
  Has anyone succeeded in blocking copyright though? I havn't illegally downloaded anything for years, but I've never been in a position where I couldn't find a copy of copyrighted material if I wanted it. With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    No. The copyright issue has not been solved. It's probably easier than ever, but enough friction has been removed from legal access to content that the vast majority of people will pay.
- filoleg 7y ago
  Because the crime of "breaking copyright" can be solved by blocking and removing the offending content. Yes, they can move it to another platform, but then again, "breaking copyright" is a crime in on itself, there is no other "root crime" that is the real issue. Every time you remove the offending posts and links, you solve an instance of this crime, which sounds fairly simple. The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down. You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it! The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.
- smegger001 7y ago
  Because the MPAA and RIAA can afford better lawyers than slaves.
- nwallin 7y ago
  Slavery is so illegal in the developed world that it's not even an issue. When people engage in human trafficking, the law enforcement apparatus puts the full brunt of its power into punishing the perpetrators. The government spends substantial sums of money preventing these sorts of abuses. The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them. The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody. Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anon1m0us 7y ago
Right! Sites like this and bitcoin could be handing criminals to the authorities on a silver platter. Why are they shutting them down? They should be intentionally creating sites like this as honey pots. Would that be entrapment? Catch a predatoresque?
- filoleg 7y ago
  If I understand it correctly, in simple terms, it is only entrapment if you are doing something to make a person commit a crime he wouldn't have done otherwise. For example, if you are an undercover cop and pressure a random taxi driver to be your getaway driver for a robbery, it would be entrapment. If you just host a honeypot website, post links to it in a few shady places, and people end up using it to do illegal things out of their own volition, it wouldn't count as entrapment.
pergadad 7y ago
A couple journalists fairly easily find these listing on public platforms - and you're telling me the platforms could not do easily a lot more to capture and report these folks?
modwest 7y ago
> Of course we don't want social media enabling that. Eliding that it not only "enables" it in a binary way, but also "enables" it in a that creates exponential reach and growth of the market. This explosive mechanic is one of the things implies by the phrase, "tech boom." Your response reduces social media's role to a one-sentence hand-wave. > The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement. Is your point that you can't do the latter if you do the former? Because that's not the case in any way. > These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. You're _technically_ right in the very narrow sense that there will likely still be some kind of market for chattel slavery even without Instagram. But again you are minimizing Instagram's (I'm using Instagram as a stand-in for all the companies involved) role and responsibilities in this situation for some reason. When we talk about these companies we use phrasing like, "huge tech platforms," "tech giants," etc. To my mind you are defending these "tech behemoths" from the very idea of public accountability. The response to the question you raise of government & law enforcement enforcing the law is so obvious it barely merits response, but: yes, obviously the government should govern and law enforcement should enforce the law. Bringing it up at all seems to me like another deflection away from "Instagram"'s responsibilities in governance on & public accountability for their platforms.
blablabla123 7y ago
> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement. I agree but on the other hand they should play an active role. Not an expert on this one, but speaking about hate related posts on Facebook, they did turn a blind eye on that. That makes me think they don't care about < 1% content that might be a problem. If they don't play an active role, they are facilitators. Probably in most jurisdictions this makes people guilty as well. Moreover it gives law&order proponents arguments to just watch literally everyone. And in any case the law enforcements get only aware of a small percentage of crimes happening. Basically they are no more than a crutch to mend torn fabrics of society.

antocv 7y ago

Why can these apps block "breaking copyright" and discussions about piratebay, but cant stop slave trade? Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery? Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this. But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.

api 7y ago
Copyright infringement harms corporations with lobbyists. Slavery harms poor people.
- __s 7y ago
  & yet copyright infringement goes on The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 7y ago
    I don't think the two are comparable at all. Labor is fundamentally scarce while copying or streaming media is almost free and not intrinsically limited.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  And sadly, lots of rich folks with influence buy slaves. Look at what Epstein was doing. Where was he finding those he abused? There must have been a market. The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.
aristophenes 7y ago
I don't know why you are saying this, because all I did was say we should stop slavery. Whether or not we protect copyright or whatever, we definitely should stop slavery. Taking down a post isn't stopping slavery, it's insulating elite Westerners like myself from being aware that slavery is actually happening. Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  I really wonder what sort of information sources people are exposing themselves to for "slavery still exists, and tech platforms are used to facilitate it" to be a revelation. I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.
- SllX 7y ago
  Last I heard, today’s global slave trade makes the Transatlantic Slave Trade at its peak look like a drop in the bucket. I don’t know if that comparison is accurate, but slavery never died in the world, it merely became illegal. https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-a-growing-global-scourge https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-...
roenxi 7y ago
Has anyone succeeded in blocking copyright though? I havn't illegally downloaded anything for years, but I've never been in a position where I couldn't find a copy of copyrighted material if I wanted it. With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  No. The copyright issue has not been solved. It's probably easier than ever, but enough friction has been removed from legal access to content that the vast majority of people will pay.
filoleg 7y ago
Because the crime of "breaking copyright" can be solved by blocking and removing the offending content. Yes, they can move it to another platform, but then again, "breaking copyright" is a crime in on itself, there is no other "root crime" that is the real issue. Every time you remove the offending posts and links, you solve an instance of this crime, which sounds fairly simple. The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
- vkou 7y ago
  > The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down. You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it! The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.
smegger001 7y ago
Because the MPAA and RIAA can afford better lawyers than slaves.
nwallin 7y ago
Slavery is so illegal in the developed world that it's not even an issue. When people engage in human trafficking, the law enforcement apparatus puts the full brunt of its power into punishing the perpetrators. The government spends substantial sums of money preventing these sorts of abuses. The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them. The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody. Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

anon1m0us 7y ago

Right! Sites like this and bitcoin could be handing criminals to the authorities on a silver platter. Why are they shutting them down? They should be intentionally creating sites like this as honey pots. Would that be entrapment? Catch a predatoresque?

filoleg 7y ago
If I understand it correctly, in simple terms, it is only entrapment if you are doing something to make a person commit a crime he wouldn't have done otherwise. For example, if you are an undercover cop and pressure a random taxi driver to be your getaway driver for a robbery, it would be entrapment. If you just host a honeypot website, post links to it in a few shady places, and people end up using it to do illegal things out of their own volition, it wouldn't count as entrapment.

pergadad 7y ago

A couple journalists fairly easily find these listing on public platforms - and you're telling me the platforms could not do easily a lot more to capture and report these folks?

modwest 7y ago

> Of course we don't want social media enabling that. Eliding that it not only "enables" it in a binary way, but also "enables" it in a that creates exponential reach and growth of the market. This explosive mechanic is one of the things implies by the phrase, "tech boom." Your response reduces social media's role to a one-sentence hand-wave. > The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement. Is your point that you can't do the latter if you do the former? Because that's not the case in any way. > These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. You're _technically_ right in the very narrow sense that there will likely still be some kind of market for chattel slavery even without Instagram. But again you are minimizing Instagram's (I'm using Instagram as a stand-in for all the companies involved) role and responsibilities in this situation for some reason. When we talk about these companies we use phrasing like, "huge tech platforms," "tech giants," etc. To my mind you are defending these "tech behemoths" from the very idea of public accountability. The response to the question you raise of government & law enforcement enforcing the law is so obvious it barely merits response, but: yes, obviously the government should govern and law enforcement should enforce the law. Bringing it up at all seems to me like another deflection away from "Instagram"'s responsibilities in governance on & public accountability for their platforms.

blablabla123 7y ago

> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement. I agree but on the other hand they should play an active role. Not an expert on this one, but speaking about hate related posts on Facebook, they did turn a blind eye on that. That makes me think they don't care about < 1% content that might be a problem. If they don't play an active role, they are facilitators. Probably in most jurisdictions this makes people guilty as well. Moreover it gives law&order proponents arguments to just watch literally everyone. And in any case the law enforcements get only aware of a small percentage of crimes happening. Basically they are no more than a crutch to mend torn fabrics of society.