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They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think

They could have a checkbox "remove spam" that the moderators could turn on and off. There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. I think the law should be "platforms should not tinker with their users' expressed preferences - you can't hide something that they 've chosen to subscribe to". > And would this extend to marketplaces? I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work

danShumway 7y ago
> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. People say this, I don't think it's true. I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line. Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.
- buboard 7y ago
  reddit has already a "spam level" slider. They should allow subreddits to turn off spam filtering completely - although of course it doesnt make sense. But if they want to be classified as a simple carrier they would have to .
  - danShumway 7y ago
    In your definition of censorship, would it be OK for Facebook to hide some political articles behind a "filter dishonest posts" setting that was on by default for users and groups? Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
    - buboard 7y ago
      I think facebook should be required to have controls to turn off their various filterings. And they should be held liable if someone can prove they systematic hide certain views from searches. That would be enough for me (having them on by default is also OK). (Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)
pavel_lishin 7y ago
> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.
- buboard 7y ago
  alright, i dont want to keep you from work, but i agree they should be able to turn off spam filtering, even though it makes little sense. And they should be held liable if a court can prove that their spam filter is biased in some illegal way
crooked-v 7y ago
> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. For an example to the contrary, look at how many Wikipedia articles get deleted as 'self-promotion' even when they're just simple informational entries about a business or semi-notable person.
abathur 7y ago
Replying to your root comment but also addressing some points in subcomments. Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do. But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here... - Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices. - Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity. - I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam). - Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do. - If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.
- deleted 7y ago
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danShumway 7y ago

> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. People say this, I don't think it's true. I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line. Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.

buboard 7y ago
reddit has already a "spam level" slider. They should allow subreddits to turn off spam filtering completely - although of course it doesnt make sense. But if they want to be classified as a simple carrier they would have to .
- danShumway 7y ago
  In your definition of censorship, would it be OK for Facebook to hide some political articles behind a "filter dishonest posts" setting that was on by default for users and groups? Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
  - buboard 7y ago
    I think facebook should be required to have controls to turn off their various filterings. And they should be held liable if someone can prove they systematic hide certain views from searches. That would be enough for me (having them on by default is also OK). (Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)

pavel_lishin 7y ago

> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.

buboard 7y ago
alright, i dont want to keep you from work, but i agree they should be able to turn off spam filtering, even though it makes little sense. And they should be held liable if a court can prove that their spam filter is biased in some illegal way

crooked-v 7y ago

> There's not a lot of ambiguity about spam so it's not a real issue. For an example to the contrary, look at how many Wikipedia articles get deleted as 'self-promotion' even when they're just simple informational entries about a business or semi-notable person.

abathur 7y ago

Replying to your root comment but also addressing some points in subcomments. Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do. But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here... - Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices. - Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity. - I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam). - Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do. - If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]