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I might be missing something here, but if that kind of stuff really is on Reddit then I would want them to be made to take responsibility for having it on their

I might be missing something here, but if that kind of stuff really is on Reddit then I would want them to be made to take responsibility for having it on their site and suffer the consequences if it is not removed and reported to the authorities.

disiplus 6y ago
i don't think reddit is hosting underage porn, and im sure there is some subreddit somewhere that has questionable content (the same as there is copyrighted material somewhere deep on youtube) but i don't think that it is so widespread.
- 9dev 6y ago
  ...just go ahead and scroll through r/gonewild, and you know what the OP meant.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  Minors are 100% uploading to popular porn subreddits. There might not be a specific r/jailbait any more(and there probably is), but it's definetely still happening. They just have "18" in the title now.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?
- Larrikin 6y ago
  This question presumes that they have some inalienable right to scale despite not having solved this problem
  - headmelted 6y ago
    This. It's not the law's job to cater to an organisation's bottom line. I'm sure someone is going to mention that this is in fact exactly how laws are applied in practice, but that's a separate discussion.
    - miracle2k 6y ago
      Note that Pornhub was not convicted, or even legally accused of violating any law. They were just financially deplatformed. People who would like to change the law should certainly feel responsible to weight potential undesirable effects.
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Isn’t that the whole intent of section 230?
  - preinheimer 6y ago
    I think this is a point that tech folks like to sweep under the rug all too often. All of these sound wrong: - Walmarts are huge! It's impossible to build fire suppression at that scale. - Ford builds an insane number of cars every year, it's not possible to ensure each car is safe at that scale. - The United States burns 20,000 barrels of oil PER DAY. It's simply not possible to ensure a "safe" product at that scale. - This buffet serves 20,000 plates per day, it's impossible to ensure food safety at that scale. Each of those problems has been ~solved. Or those business wouldn't be operating. You only need to moderate a million messages if your customers are posting that many. If you can't afford to hire moderators to handle those million messages maybe it's your business model that's the problem, not moderation.
    - mytherin 6y ago
      Fire suppression systems fail, cars get recalled or malfunction, people get food poisoning in restaurants or from food bought at a supermarket. Any product, not just tech, runs into problems when manufactured at scale. Tech is more visible because it is newer and in the spotlight. Nobody says "stop manufacturing cars" when one manufacturer issues a safety recall because cars have been around so long. The entire premise of producing 100X fewer cars so we can hand-craft cars and hand-check them is ridiculous - we simply accept the occasional manufacturing defect or product recall as the rates at which they happen are so small. These are all rounding errors, and the benefits of scale far outweigh the cons. The same applies to tech. Content moderation has been ~solved as well. The overwhelming majority of content on social media platforms, websites, etc is regular, legal content. The illegal content that makes it through the filters and stays up for a significant period of time is a rounding error.
- rapnie 6y ago
  Not saying it is a "right" way, but this video of the ActivityPub conference contrasts content moderation of the big centralized platforms to how moderation is conducted on the decentralized fediverse (e.g. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, etc). Spoiler: where the latter makes it way more manageable, and for the former it is near undoable. https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966 https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01...
- wittyreference 6y ago
  If a business can't run profitably and legally at scale, then that business model is a bad fit for that scale and shouldn't exist at that scale (presuming the laws in question are reasonable, which I think 'banning child porn' qualifies as.) It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until someone comes up with a feasible solution, we'll just have to exempt them from being responsible!" Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up."
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    People are going to watch pirated porn. If they can't find it on American sites they'll go to sites that aren't effected by American laws/regulations/journalism. That would probably make trafficking worse as the new site has no reason to take down any videos as their value add is refusal to censor.
  - null0pointer 6y ago
    This is an extremely weak argument. At a certain scale, policy becomes about statistics rather than absolutes. This applies to absolutely everything, including the laws themselves. Companies in all industries have to occasionally issue recalls on dangerous or faulty products, just like PornHub or Reddit have to occasionally delete stolen or illegal content.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    > Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up." Every drug has acceptable levels of impurities. There is a non-zero acceptable level of rat feces in your food. Your bank rounds the value of your account to some decimal place. The various parts of your car have some mean time between failures. In the real world we place bounds on how much bad stuff is acceptable, and these bounds are determined mostly by practicality and economics. "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world. A real law takes the form "perform these steps or reasonable equivalents to limit X to a tolerable level." You can claim that reddit is not taking a step it is required to by law, but it's not breaking the law just because it hasn't developed a perfect solution to a problem that likely can only be solved approximately.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone? You do it the way the porn industry has for years. You get consenting actors. You get releases from the participants. You keep track of who is in the videos. If you are hosting third party content, you verify they do the above. This isn't like hosting a Disney movie on YouTube. If you screw this up, there are real victims here. There should be some weight and repercussions to posting child porn, revenge porn, or any kind of porn where some of the actors have not signed off on it.
- ralfn 6y ago
  You do realize the success of the platforms is the result of finding legal loopholes. That's the innovation. What if we are a media publisher but than without worker rights and unions? Youtube. What if we start a hotel franchise but without any regulation or oversight or liability? Airbnb. What if we start a cab company but make all our employees independent contractors, ignore all regulations and put all liability and legal risk on the independent contractors? Silicon Valley is nothing but a bunch of young spoiled boys asking themselves the most American business question of all: have you tried slavery yet? Business model innovations where you make money while someone pays all the costs. >Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone There is no investment if you do that, because the competitive advantage comes from the stealing. Nobody is investing in technology. Nobody is doing actual R&D. It's all about the viability of the scam. How profitable is this loophole? We go out of our way to engineer protocols and technology and platforms that make it impossible to do that the right thing (by design). From p2p networks in the 90ties to crypto currencies. From YouTube to Spotify. It's a dog eat dog world and I'm not here judging any individual. But let's not be naive. Theft is the plan. Abuse is the strategy. Fortunes are not built on sweat. The people who work hard are the ones you hire to clean our house. The ones that pick our vegetables. But we at least show the respect to others to not lie about the true nature of the successes of our industry.
  - uxcolumbo 6y ago
    >> We go out of our way to engineer protocols and technology and platforms that make it impossible to do that the right thing (by design). From p2p networks in the 90ties to crypto currencies. From YouTube to Spotify. I don't understand this bit. So are you saying crypto currencies are making it impossible to do the right thing? If so, what do you mean by that?
    - ralfn 6y ago
      >So are you saying crypto currencies are making it impossible to do the right thing? Cryptocurrencies are designed to subvert regulation and oversight. That's the selling point. That current societal infrastructure to protect innocent (sometimes gullible) people from everything from weapons trade or pyramid schemes. If you want to 'make it do the right thing', thats already exists and is your wallet. Thats called money. A ledger with a tax identity. A bank account that requires a legal id. There is no point in burning all this electricity to verify those hashes, except to circumvent regulation and law. I can't start a pyramid scheme and steal money from gullable idiots. Thankfully, an ICO is completely legal (for now). If you want to sell bread to hungry people, use money. If you want to sell guns to a hitman, use a cryptocurrency. Thats why cryptocurrencies are economically viable compared to money. Because they make it harder to apply the laws we voted on democratically, like how you can't sell children for sex. The reason any money out there is investing into cryptocurrency technology, is because of the expectation of moral subserversion of society. Its a not a side effect. Its the bussiness model. What do you think Venture Capital considers some startups worth so much money? Because they see the potential of price dumping and becoming a monopolist. If markets were actually properly regulated to always keep competition alive, people wouldn't be investing millions into apps and websites, they would be investing in actual R&D and hard science. But doing the real work, can never compete, with just plain cheating. You always make more money being the bad guy. Even if a lot of startups have sincere intentions (Facebooks' mission was to connect people, not destroy democracy), the money will chase the decision down.
- riffic 6y ago
  Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well: - Any moderation policy will anger someone - Content moderation is inherently subjective - Errors at scale result in many errors over time Mike Masnick goes into this at depth here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni... the three points above were taken from the video posted in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419822

disiplus 6y ago

i don't think reddit is hosting underage porn, and im sure there is some subreddit somewhere that has questionable content (the same as there is copyrighted material somewhere deep on youtube) but i don't think that it is so widespread.

9dev 6y ago
...just go ahead and scroll through r/gonewild, and you know what the OP meant.
thatguy0900 6y ago
Minors are 100% uploading to popular porn subreddits. There might not be a specific r/jailbait any more(and there probably is), but it's definetely still happening. They just have "18" in the title now.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

Genuine question: how do you scale content moderation to millions of posts without hiring millions of workers at astronomical cost (who can make mistakes, like we’ve seen with DMCA take down notices, YouTube censorship when not justified, AppStore censorship,even GitHub made these mistakes, etc... some of these mistakes ruin peoples’ livelihoods). Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?

Larrikin 6y ago
This question presumes that they have some inalienable right to scale despite not having solved this problem
- headmelted 6y ago
  This. It's not the law's job to cater to an organisation's bottom line. I'm sure someone is going to mention that this is in fact exactly how laws are applied in practice, but that's a separate discussion.
  - miracle2k 6y ago
    Note that Pornhub was not convicted, or even legally accused of violating any law. They were just financially deplatformed. People who would like to change the law should certainly feel responsible to weight potential undesirable effects.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Isn’t that the whole intent of section 230?
- preinheimer 6y ago
  I think this is a point that tech folks like to sweep under the rug all too often. All of these sound wrong: - Walmarts are huge! It's impossible to build fire suppression at that scale. - Ford builds an insane number of cars every year, it's not possible to ensure each car is safe at that scale. - The United States burns 20,000 barrels of oil PER DAY. It's simply not possible to ensure a "safe" product at that scale. - This buffet serves 20,000 plates per day, it's impossible to ensure food safety at that scale. Each of those problems has been ~solved. Or those business wouldn't be operating. You only need to moderate a million messages if your customers are posting that many. If you can't afford to hire moderators to handle those million messages maybe it's your business model that's the problem, not moderation.
  - mytherin 6y ago
    Fire suppression systems fail, cars get recalled or malfunction, people get food poisoning in restaurants or from food bought at a supermarket. Any product, not just tech, runs into problems when manufactured at scale. Tech is more visible because it is newer and in the spotlight. Nobody says "stop manufacturing cars" when one manufacturer issues a safety recall because cars have been around so long. The entire premise of producing 100X fewer cars so we can hand-craft cars and hand-check them is ridiculous - we simply accept the occasional manufacturing defect or product recall as the rates at which they happen are so small. These are all rounding errors, and the benefits of scale far outweigh the cons. The same applies to tech. Content moderation has been ~solved as well. The overwhelming majority of content on social media platforms, websites, etc is regular, legal content. The illegal content that makes it through the filters and stays up for a significant period of time is a rounding error.
rapnie 6y ago
Not saying it is a "right" way, but this video of the ActivityPub conference contrasts content moderation of the big centralized platforms to how moderation is conducted on the decentralized fediverse (e.g. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, etc). Spoiler: where the latter makes it way more manageable, and for the former it is near undoable. https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01f38f966 https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01...
wittyreference 6y ago
If a business can't run profitably and legally at scale, then that business model is a bad fit for that scale and shouldn't exist at that scale (presuming the laws in question are reasonable, which I think 'banning child porn' qualifies as.) It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until someone comes up with a feasible solution, we'll just have to exempt them from being responsible!" Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up."
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  People are going to watch pirated porn. If they can't find it on American sites they'll go to sites that aren't effected by American laws/regulations/journalism. That would probably make trafficking worse as the new site has no reason to take down any videos as their value add is refusal to censor.
- null0pointer 6y ago
  This is an extremely weak argument. At a certain scale, policy becomes about statistics rather than absolutes. This applies to absolutely everything, including the laws themselves. Companies in all industries have to occasionally issue recalls on dangerous or faulty products, just like PornHub or Reddit have to occasionally delete stolen or illegal content.
- jjk166 6y ago
  > Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up." Every drug has acceptable levels of impurities. There is a non-zero acceptable level of rat feces in your food. Your bank rounds the value of your account to some decimal place. The various parts of your car have some mean time between failures. In the real world we place bounds on how much bad stuff is acceptable, and these bounds are determined mostly by practicality and economics. "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world. A real law takes the form "perform these steps or reasonable equivalents to limit X to a tolerable level." You can claim that reddit is not taking a step it is required to by law, but it's not breaking the law just because it hasn't developed a perfect solution to a problem that likely can only be solved approximately.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone? You do it the way the porn industry has for years. You get consenting actors. You get releases from the participants. You keep track of who is in the videos. If you are hosting third party content, you verify they do the above. This isn't like hosting a Disney movie on YouTube. If you screw this up, there are real victims here. There should be some weight and repercussions to posting child porn, revenge porn, or any kind of porn where some of the actors have not signed off on it.
ralfn 6y ago
You do realize the success of the platforms is the result of finding legal loopholes. That's the innovation. What if we are a media publisher but than without worker rights and unions? Youtube. What if we start a hotel franchise but without any regulation or oversight or liability? Airbnb. What if we start a cab company but make all our employees independent contractors, ignore all regulations and put all liability and legal risk on the independent contractors? Silicon Valley is nothing but a bunch of young spoiled boys asking themselves the most American business question of all: have you tried slavery yet? Business model innovations where you make money while someone pays all the costs. >Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone There is no investment if you do that, because the competitive advantage comes from the stealing. Nobody is investing in technology. Nobody is doing actual R&D. It's all about the viability of the scam. How profitable is this loophole? We go out of our way to engineer protocols and technology and platforms that make it impossible to do that the right thing (by design). From p2p networks in the 90ties to crypto currencies. From YouTube to Spotify. It's a dog eat dog world and I'm not here judging any individual. But let's not be naive. Theft is the plan. Abuse is the strategy. Fortunes are not built on sweat. The people who work hard are the ones you hire to clean our house. The ones that pick our vegetables. But we at least show the respect to others to not lie about the true nature of the successes of our industry.
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  >> We go out of our way to engineer protocols and technology and platforms that make it impossible to do that the right thing (by design). From p2p networks in the 90ties to crypto currencies. From YouTube to Spotify. I don't understand this bit. So are you saying crypto currencies are making it impossible to do the right thing? If so, what do you mean by that?
  - ralfn 6y ago
    >So are you saying crypto currencies are making it impossible to do the right thing? Cryptocurrencies are designed to subvert regulation and oversight. That's the selling point. That current societal infrastructure to protect innocent (sometimes gullible) people from everything from weapons trade or pyramid schemes. If you want to 'make it do the right thing', thats already exists and is your wallet. Thats called money. A ledger with a tax identity. A bank account that requires a legal id. There is no point in burning all this electricity to verify those hashes, except to circumvent regulation and law. I can't start a pyramid scheme and steal money from gullable idiots. Thankfully, an ICO is completely legal (for now). If you want to sell bread to hungry people, use money. If you want to sell guns to a hitman, use a cryptocurrency. Thats why cryptocurrencies are economically viable compared to money. Because they make it harder to apply the laws we voted on democratically, like how you can't sell children for sex. The reason any money out there is investing into cryptocurrency technology, is because of the expectation of moral subserversion of society. Its a not a side effect. Its the bussiness model. What do you think Venture Capital considers some startups worth so much money? Because they see the potential of price dumping and becoming a monopolist. If markets were actually properly regulated to always keep competition alive, people wouldn't be investing millions into apps and websites, they would be investing in actual R&D and hard science. But doing the real work, can never compete, with just plain cheating. You always make more money being the bad guy. Even if a lot of startups have sincere intentions (Facebooks' mission was to connect people, not destroy democracy), the money will chase the decision down.
riffic 6y ago
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well: - Any moderation policy will anger someone - Content moderation is inherently subjective - Errors at scale result in many errors over time Mike Masnick goes into this at depth here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni... the three points above were taken from the video posted in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419822