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I was trying to reply to a post that got flagged, so I'll repost at the top level instead: I strongly disagree with [the other poster's lack of concern about w

by schoen 6y ago

I was trying to reply to a post that got flagged, so I'll repost at the top level instead: I strongly disagree with [the other poster's lack of concern about war crimes], but I want to try to paraphrase the part of your intuition that makes sense to me. Facebook gets criticized by its users and governments both for taking down "too much" and "too little", sometimes with regard to the same post or subject area. Suppose user X posts something related to an armed conflict, violence, suffering, or death. This post might be part of a crime by X against Y, or evidence of a crime by Y against Z, or evidence of a crime by Y against Z, or not really a crime at all but just really disturbing and upsetting. Also, in various circumstances people might want records about violent crimes against them to be destroyed, or publicized, or not destroyed but not publicized (only used by some judicial process, or truth-and-reconciliation process, or historians, or something). Also, user X might have an intention that's different from the primary value or valence of the content, like prurient enthusiasm for violence, or making one of the parties depicted look bad, or trying to intimidate one of the parties depicted. In order to figure out which category (or categories) a post falls into, Facebook has to (1) learn the language(s) involved in all posts, (2) learn the political context of violent conflicts, (3) perform some level of adjudication and fact-finding about political conflicts and disputes, and maybe even (4) try to understand the motives of the person who posted something on each particular occasion. Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence?

save_ferris 6y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? I’ll grant that we’re in uncharted territory as far as the scale and depth of what a company like Facebook has to deal with on a regular basis regarding the amount and variance in the content that they see and manage. That said, Facebook constantly tells us how they want to change the world for the better. If that’s not just marketing bullshit and they want us to take them at their word, then they need to recognize that the position they’ve put themselves in demands a level of accountability and responsibility that they’re clearly not comfortable with. Ultimately, citizens should be able to define what’s reasonable to expect out of Facebook, not the difficulty of a particular content problem. Becoming one of the largest tech companies in existence doesn’t grant one immunity from real problems involving their content. If Facebook can’t manage their content at scale to address these kinds of issues, then perhaps they shouldn’t be managing content at this kind of scale.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The problem is that different sets of people have different beliefs about what constitutes accountability and responsibility. For example, the article criticizes algorithmic moderation of terrorist content as an abdication of responsibility, but many groups argue that manual moderation is an abdication of responsibility - the EU is considering a law that would require Facebook to algorithmically moderate terrorist content. That doesn't mean, of course, that nobody can have an opinion on what the right thing for Facebook to do is. But you can't abstract over the substance of the criticism and say Facebook isn't "addressing these kinds of issues" without specifying whose standards they ought to follow.
- closeparen 6y ago
  I don't understand this idea that "citizens" can hold the reins of censorship. If an item's removal is up for public debate, it was never really removed. E.g. it does not really solve the problem of Holocaust denial content if you still have people complaining that Holocaust denial content should be allowed. And it is not a democratic law anymore if you don't get to criticize it. Censors operated in secret and beyond accountability not because of some accident of history, but because it was essential to the nature of their work.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Censorship isn't all-or-nothing though - spoiler tags being a common example. It stops you from reading it and says "warning you don't want to read this because X", then leaves it up to you. You could censor misinformation/etc with this method, yet still be held accountable.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      Disclaimers can be helpful but you’re still giving those views a platform, and horrible people who want to congregate and reinforce their views to each other can still do it. I don’t think this satisfies the anti-big-tech crowd, although I’d be happy if it did.
- 6y ago
DSingularity 6y ago
Facebook creates these features and refuses to own their consequences. They gave everyone a megaphone and a private tv channel. Now they want to run away from owning responsibility for the content which they use to bring the users who will see the ads which line their pockets. Unacceptable. Maybe it’s time to cancel features if you don’t want to dedicate some portion of your many billions of profits to solve the problems which said features create for society. Oh and to everyone who will say it’s hard, maybe you can’t solve these problems then you shouldn’t be rolling out a feature. It’s just that simple.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  So the phone company provided a way for criminals to organize in secret and communicate with each other without having to meetup in person so the phone company is responsible for that crime? Unless I mis-understood your argument. It seemed to be that you should be responsible for everything bad someone else does with something you made. You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    My take on the debate over internet censorship is that the "free speech" contingent badly wants to deal with it using elegant, consistent, universal principles. While a solution that meets those criteria should always be the goal, we must recognize when it isn't possible. If we don't, we wind up with something that satisfies our ideology without actually being a good solution. Such issues often result in new law. If any phenomenon creates a certain level of harm, a society is liable to alter its laws to deal with it, breaking with convention if necessary. Regarding your phone company example, what that means is that the answer to your question might depend on the extent to which the criminal activity is harming society. Regarding Facebook, I'm open to betraying my normal principles, because the amount of injury Facebook does to the world justifies exceptional remedies.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    > You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them. This is the logic used to put drug dealers and manufacturers in prison when people overdose on their drugs and die.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
burkaman 6y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? That is their responsibility. If they have an unreasonable amount of responsibility, then it follows that they have an unreasonable amount of power. The solution is to take away that power, not to live with it being wielded uncontrollably.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's not uncontrollable. It's just controllable by a heterogeneous set of people with different goals, ideals, and policy prescriptions. Splitting up Facebook's power among a dozen smaller networks wouldn't change that fundamental conflict.
  - burkaman 6y ago
    Facebook has a corporate hierarchy, and there are a small number of people at the top who have real meaningful power, even if they can't micromanage every decision. Splitting up their power wouldn't magically fix any problems, but it would lessen the potential damage one person or small group of people could do. It would also limit the damage an outside actor could do by abusing a platform, the same way America's "distributed" presidential election is safer than having one centralized election or one system that every state uses.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Sure, there are lots of reasons it might be better to decentralize. I'm just saying that achieving specific content moderation standards isn't one of them, because there's no reason to expect new, smaller companies to favor Human Rights Watch's preferred policies.
      - burkaman 6y ago
        Yeah ok, we agree. I don't think smaller companies would moderate better, just that it would be less of a concern when they do it badly. I mean there are small social medias companies right now that don't moderate at all, but it's not a pressing issue because they don't have much impact.
188201 6y ago
Maybe put it in another way. If Facebook is only a platform of communication, just like telephone or email, no one is going to have a ground to complain about Facebook inability to ban or ignore crime or hate speech or whatever unpleasant thing people like to ban it. However, Facebook choose to use algorithmic feed to provide new information to user, then it become a media company in this sense. So as a traditional media company of course Facebook has the responsibility to ensure the content is suitable for public even if Facebook is not the producer of the content. Just give user chronological feed if they don't want to invest the effort. Facebook can't maintain its business model while tried to dodge responsibility. After all, the problem is most people accept this kind of business model and most people don't care. When social media come to power they have enough capital for lobbying to persuade the government not to outlaw their business model.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? No, and that is precisely why their moderation should be transparent.
roenxi 6y ago
It may not be the first instinct in a forum of programmers; but really there is a question hanging over whether something like Facebook can/should/will continue to be an international company. At some point it could be discovered that the problem they are trying to solve is politically unsolvable. Regulatory structure starts to build up and it becomes impossible to run multinational social companies; as a topic for thought experiment.
- zby 6y ago
  Or we get a world government.
atoav 6y ago
While whoever is blocking content indeed finds themselves between a rock and a hard place and will never be able to please everybody, I don't think there is only a choice between "leave it up" and "block it". I think one solution would be to archive certain violent imagery in a nonpublic storage and give access to historians, journalists and scientists on a project basis to these. This isn't without challenges and cost, but as a humanity we have to do certain things to make sure violations of our human rights don't get flagged for deletion. I just wish our great minds would actually care about problems like these beyond chasing the next market based disruptive technology with totally unclear societal consequences.
PeterisP 6y ago
There's no inherent conflict between taking things down and preserving evidence - it should not be difficult for Facebook to "cease publishing" a particular piece of content (i.e. stop showing it to the public) while preserving it in their systems as evidence, together with all the metadata of who/when/how posted or reposted it. In fact, for the main categories that must be taken down quickly (e.g. child abuse material, death threats, etc) it seems obvious that the evidence must be preserved - why not extend it to all the violent stuff that gets banned.
beefield 6y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things Yes. It is then up to Facebook to decide if they want to play the game where they are expected and required to do that, or dissolve themselves to an insignificant enough operation where it is no more reasonable to expect that. Either you are the most significant social media company in the world and face the consequences, or you are not. This is free world to decide those kind of things...
Xelbair 6y ago
>Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? I would say it depends on how Facebook presents itself to the wide world. Is is just a content aggregator that allows others to share their thoughts? Nope, we shouldn't expect them to do it. Are they a platform, where they curate the content? absolutely yes, they chose this - you can't eat the cake and still have it.
dalbasal 6y ago
>Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral I think there are two ways to think about Facebook, in the context of this article. One is as a journalistic organisation. If we go that way, then yes, I think it is reasonable to expect Facebook to make massive efforts to understand context and make informed decisions. These decisions are impactful. If you are the primary journalistic news source for something this meaningful, then yes, you have a responsibility to do this job well. The other way of seeing Facebook is as a neutral platform. In that case, they need to have genuinely neutral and transparent rules. Ad hoc, subjective, closed door decision making is not neutral. The problem is that Facebook is having it both ways. So, they're getting criticism (as you point out) from both directions. That's not unfair to Facebook, it's a choice they make.
tripzilch 6y ago
> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? It's reasonable to hold them accountable for the extent they're facilitating the problems. Even (especially) if it's an unavoidable by-product of FB's existence.

by schoen 6y ago

save_ferris 6y ago

> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? I’ll grant that we’re in uncharted territory as far as the scale and depth of what a company like Facebook has to deal with on a regular basis regarding the amount and variance in the content that they see and manage. That said, Facebook constantly tells us how they want to change the world for the better. If that’s not just marketing bullshit and they want us to take them at their word, then they need to recognize that the position they’ve put themselves in demands a level of accountability and responsibility that they’re clearly not comfortable with. Ultimately, citizens should be able to define what’s reasonable to expect out of Facebook, not the difficulty of a particular content problem. Becoming one of the largest tech companies in existence doesn’t grant one immunity from real problems involving their content. If Facebook can’t manage their content at scale to address these kinds of issues, then perhaps they shouldn’t be managing content at this kind of scale.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The problem is that different sets of people have different beliefs about what constitutes accountability and responsibility. For example, the article criticizes algorithmic moderation of terrorist content as an abdication of responsibility, but many groups argue that manual moderation is an abdication of responsibility - the EU is considering a law that would require Facebook to algorithmically moderate terrorist content. That doesn't mean, of course, that nobody can have an opinion on what the right thing for Facebook to do is. But you can't abstract over the substance of the criticism and say Facebook isn't "addressing these kinds of issues" without specifying whose standards they ought to follow.
closeparen 6y ago
I don't understand this idea that "citizens" can hold the reins of censorship. If an item's removal is up for public debate, it was never really removed. E.g. it does not really solve the problem of Holocaust denial content if you still have people complaining that Holocaust denial content should be allowed. And it is not a democratic law anymore if you don't get to criticize it. Censors operated in secret and beyond accountability not because of some accident of history, but because it was essential to the nature of their work.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  Censorship isn't all-or-nothing though - spoiler tags being a common example. It stops you from reading it and says "warning you don't want to read this because X", then leaves it up to you. You could censor misinformation/etc with this method, yet still be held accountable.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Disclaimers can be helpful but you’re still giving those views a platform, and horrible people who want to congregate and reinforce their views to each other can still do it. I don’t think this satisfies the anti-big-tech crowd, although I’d be happy if it did.
6y ago

DSingularity 6y ago

Facebook creates these features and refuses to own their consequences. They gave everyone a megaphone and a private tv channel. Now they want to run away from owning responsibility for the content which they use to bring the users who will see the ads which line their pockets. Unacceptable. Maybe it’s time to cancel features if you don’t want to dedicate some portion of your many billions of profits to solve the problems which said features create for society. Oh and to everyone who will say it’s hard, maybe you can’t solve these problems then you shouldn’t be rolling out a feature. It’s just that simple.

gfxgirl 6y ago
So the phone company provided a way for criminals to organize in secret and communicate with each other without having to meetup in person so the phone company is responsible for that crime? Unless I mis-understood your argument. It seemed to be that you should be responsible for everything bad someone else does with something you made. You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  My take on the debate over internet censorship is that the "free speech" contingent badly wants to deal with it using elegant, consistent, universal principles. While a solution that meets those criteria should always be the goal, we must recognize when it isn't possible. If we don't, we wind up with something that satisfies our ideology without actually being a good solution. Such issues often result in new law. If any phenomenon creates a certain level of harm, a society is liable to alter its laws to deal with it, breaking with convention if necessary. Regarding your phone company example, what that means is that the answer to your question might depend on the extent to which the criminal activity is harming society. Regarding Facebook, I'm open to betraying my normal principles, because the amount of injury Facebook does to the world justifies exceptional remedies.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > You made a cooking knife. Someone stabs someone with it. It's your responsibility. You shouldn't have introduced cooking knives into the world knowing that people might stab others with them. This is the logic used to put drug dealers and manufacturers in prison when people overdose on their drugs and die.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

burkaman 6y ago

> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? That is their responsibility. If they have an unreasonable amount of responsibility, then it follows that they have an unreasonable amount of power. The solution is to take away that power, not to live with it being wielded uncontrollably.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's not uncontrollable. It's just controllable by a heterogeneous set of people with different goals, ideals, and policy prescriptions. Splitting up Facebook's power among a dozen smaller networks wouldn't change that fundamental conflict.
- burkaman 6y ago
  Facebook has a corporate hierarchy, and there are a small number of people at the top who have real meaningful power, even if they can't micromanage every decision. Splitting up their power wouldn't magically fix any problems, but it would lessen the potential damage one person or small group of people could do. It would also limit the damage an outside actor could do by abusing a platform, the same way America's "distributed" presidential election is safer than having one centralized election or one system that every state uses.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Sure, there are lots of reasons it might be better to decentralize. I'm just saying that achieving specific content moderation standards isn't one of them, because there's no reason to expect new, smaller companies to favor Human Rights Watch's preferred policies.
    - burkaman 6y ago
      Yeah ok, we agree. I don't think smaller companies would moderate better, just that it would be less of a concern when they do it badly. I mean there are small social medias companies right now that don't moderate at all, but it's not a pressing issue because they don't have much impact.

188201 6y ago

Maybe put it in another way. If Facebook is only a platform of communication, just like telephone or email, no one is going to have a ground to complain about Facebook inability to ban or ignore crime or hate speech or whatever unpleasant thing people like to ban it. However, Facebook choose to use algorithmic feed to provide new information to user, then it become a media company in this sense. So as a traditional media company of course Facebook has the responsibility to ensure the content is suitable for public even if Facebook is not the producer of the content. Just give user chronological feed if they don't want to invest the effort. Facebook can't maintain its business model while tried to dodge responsibility. After all, the problem is most people accept this kind of business model and most people don't care. When social media come to power they have enough capital for lobbying to persuade the government not to outlaw their business model.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

roenxi 6y ago

It may not be the first instinct in a forum of programmers; but really there is a question hanging over whether something like Facebook can/should/will continue to be an international company. At some point it could be discovered that the problem they are trying to solve is politically unsolvable. Regulatory structure starts to build up and it becomes impossible to run multinational social companies; as a topic for thought experiment.

zby 6y ago
Or we get a world government.

atoav 6y ago

While whoever is blocking content indeed finds themselves between a rock and a hard place and will never be able to please everybody, I don't think there is only a choice between "leave it up" and "block it". I think one solution would be to archive certain violent imagery in a nonpublic storage and give access to historians, journalists and scientists on a project basis to these. This isn't without challenges and cost, but as a humanity we have to do certain things to make sure violations of our human rights don't get flagged for deletion. I just wish our great minds would actually care about problems like these beyond chasing the next market based disruptive technology with totally unclear societal consequences.

PeterisP 6y ago

There's no inherent conflict between taking things down and preserving evidence - it should not be difficult for Facebook to "cease publishing" a particular piece of content (i.e. stop showing it to the public) while preserving it in their systems as evidence, together with all the metadata of who/when/how posted or reposted it. In fact, for the main categories that must be taken down quickly (e.g. child abuse material, death threats, etc) it seems obvious that the evidence must be preserved - why not extend it to all the violent stuff that gets banned.

beefield 6y ago

> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things Yes. It is then up to Facebook to decide if they want to play the game where they are expected and required to do that, or dissolve themselves to an insignificant enough operation where it is no more reasonable to expect that. Either you are the most significant social media company in the world and face the consequences, or you are not. This is free world to decide those kind of things...

Xelbair 6y ago

>Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? I would say it depends on how Facebook presents itself to the wide world. Is is just a content aggregator that allows others to share their thoughts? Nope, we shouldn't expect them to do it. Are they a platform, where they curate the content? absolutely yes, they chose this - you can't eat the cake and still have it.

dalbasal 6y ago

>Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral I think there are two ways to think about Facebook, in the context of this article. One is as a journalistic organisation. If we go that way, then yes, I think it is reasonable to expect Facebook to make massive efforts to understand context and make informed decisions. These decisions are impactful. If you are the primary journalistic news source for something this meaningful, then yes, you have a responsibility to do this job well. The other way of seeing Facebook is as a neutral platform. In that case, they need to have genuinely neutral and transparent rules. Ad hoc, subjective, closed door decision making is not neutral. The problem is that Facebook is having it both ways. So, they're getting criticism (as you point out) from both directions. That's not unfair to Facebook, it's a choice they make.

tripzilch 6y ago

> Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence? It's reasonable to hold them accountable for the extent they're facilitating the problems. Even (especially) if it's an unavoidable by-product of FB's existence.