7 ms·

The big problem here is that writing a regulation that decides what's okay / not okay on a platform (either by the platform itself or by a govt) is basically im

by safog 6y ago

The big problem here is that writing a regulation that decides what's okay / not okay on a platform (either by the platform itself or by a govt) is basically impossible. Any sort of you-shalt-not-serve-this-content type of rulebook won't stand up to real world use and you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform. A couple of examples to de-politicize this: - FB says gore / violence is not allowed. There was a Facebook post on how one of Mexico's most violet cartel members was killed that circulated on FB [1], received a lot of attention, and popped up in people's feeds leading to cries to take down the post (won't someone think of the kids!). They did take it down and then the Boston marathon bombing happened. Similar pictures of blood / gore circulated but this time FB was forced to keep the pictures up in "public interest". - Nudity is not allowed on the platform. As part of their nudity filtering, they kicked off a group on breastfeeding from FB which again lead to protest and FB allowing it and modifying their policy to specifically make an exception for breastfeeding. YT and Amazon suffer from this as well (though we haven't had a big PR bust up yet). Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art) along with children's books. Beyond just playing whack-a-mole with these products, and some half assed attempts to detect nudity in book covers, I don't think a lot of progress has been made. So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators. It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5569878/the-dark-side-of-the-facebook-revolution https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5569878/the-dark-side-of-t...

walrus01 6y ago
> Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art) amazon publishes way more than that, NSFW, google "chuck tingle". The famous author of "space raptor butt invasion", and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tingle https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tin...
- recursive 6y ago
  WTF is even real life. There are hundreds of them. https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK One of my favorite titles is "Creamed In The Butt By My Handsome Living Corn"
- mcphage 6y ago
  > and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt" Don't forget the meta-level 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I'm waiting for "Pounded in the Butt by the Sexy Seattle Amazon Product Recommendation Algorithm"
nitrogen 6y ago
It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along. Ensuring a diversity of platforms with no one/two/three platforms controlling the vast majority of interaction would probably help.
- root_axis 6y ago
  People are free to use whatever platforms they want, you can't force the masses to use alternative platforms. Besides, the landscape is already very diverse, but the most popular platforms will always get the most media attention, it's not like using FB precludes the use of any other platform, most people who are active on social media are active on multiple sites. This just isn't a problem.
  - boogies 6y ago
    > People are free to use whatever platforms they want 8.1 million people wanted to use Parler. Obviously to me they can get a GNU-powered phone and Parler could get ported and they’d be free to use it. >999‰ of them probably have no idea those exist. >99‰ of them probably don’t even know what “jailbreak” means or that it’s legal, and ~900‰ probably don’t know how to do it or that they have the ability to learn it.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      I have a Parler account. I've known about PinePhone, Librem 5, and other variants since their inceptions. I've jailbroken myriad devices for years. I don't know where this idea you have that there aren't technical people - extremely technical people - across the political spectrum comes from, but you should probably disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. What people want is 1) fair treatment regardless of political affiliation or belief and 2) ease of idea transmission. There's nothing stopping people from spinning up a VM across the thousands of cloud service providers and creating their own little corner of the web, but that doesn't give you nearly the engagement of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In fact, I'm willing to bet even the most trafficked personal websites don't get one-tenth of their associated YouTube / Snapchat / TikTok accounts. How many people go to TaylorSwift.com versus her YouTube channel? Her TikTok channel? Her Twitter page?
rootusrootus 6y ago
> So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators. He would never do that. He needs regular users to stay on the platform. The censorship isn't to appease government regulators, it's to keep from alienating regular people who don't want to be exposed to it. Deflecting blame to the regulators wouldn't stop users from leaving and heading to a platform that did more effective damage control.
- safog 6y ago
  He's been saying that pretty consistently for several years though.. too lazy to dig up the links. Regular users might be somewhat impacted (if their bill gates is tracking us through vaccines post gets removed for example) but most people I'd say just want to post their breakfast / travel photos on Facebook than deal with QAnon conspiracies.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ramoz 6y ago
I address this in another top comment as well. Just additional perspective. You can't predict the future, so you have to find the one thing(s) to protect in all cases. And like you say, it can not be subjective. In Gov't Tech Acquisitions regulation the single objective is to protect and enable small and disadvantage businesses. Perhaps it could be the same with platforms that propagate info, but there is risk in creating a competitive environment without some form of formal trust system. It does seem ambitious / hard to think about.
monadic3 6y ago
Why are people consuming news on facebook at all? The idea is ridiculous for exactly the scenario you spelled out. A space that caters to news and to baby photos is not a space that makes any sense to me.
paulmd 6y ago
Well, ultimately the law is interpreted by humans, concepts like "good-faith effort" and "bona fide" exist despite those not being something you can exactly define in a law. But judges know it when they see it and it's not actually a problem in practice. This is ultimately one of those things where computer scientists (specifically) freak out because the real world isn't zeroes and ones like they're used to, it's all shades of grey, but if you act in good taste it's probably not going to be a problem. Ban the cartel murderporn, show the aftermath of the bombing (or not, at your discretion), ban the nudists, but allow breastfeeding (or not, at your discretion), all of that sounds fine to me and we don't need to code an exact line into law. This is really a common thread in HN threads discussing anything touching on laws or regulation, because computer touchers just can't wrap their head around the idea that the law isn't absolutely precisely defined in a state machine and the judge and jury are going to apply human reasoning. But that's how the legal system works. I'm going to note that there is of course a degree of self-servingness in insisting that there be an exact line drawn. It's a way for Facebook to punt on actually having to moderate their platform and push that responsibility onto the courts, because they don't want to pay humans to deal with what is ultimately a human problem that needs to be solved in human ways. The nature of the world is that there are grey areas and some stuff in the grey area is fine and some stuff shouldn't be there, and it will take human intervention to decide which is which. If you don't want to pay to do that, and you want to be 100% on the green side of the line, then you will have to default to very aggressive censorship that will probably annoy users, but that's the price of being on a free platform that doesn't want to pay for adequate moderation.
- safog 6y ago
  I think what you're missing is that FB does employ an army of content moderators to decide if something passes their bar or not. And these are low wage, button clicking jobs along the lines of the AWS mechanical turk where without very explicit clear guidelines, you fall flat on your face. For context, reviewers apparently typically spend ~0-3 seconds to determine if a piece of content (mostly pictures) is acceptable. Given the pace of content creation, I'm amazed they even get that long, I assume algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting as well. Even if you have extremely smart reviewers, if your guidelines aren't clear and you leave it to the reviewer's interpretation, you'd likely get extremely inconsistent results and that feels like a worse product experience than having no moderation at all. So either have the govt decide these guidelines (esp. on political speech) and let them eat humblepie or let the platform do it and don't complain when they ban the POTUS.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
>... you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform. No you don't. The platform is private property, they can decide whether or not they want such content, no lawyers needed. When someone gets banned or flagged on HN, does anyone mention lawyers getting involved? Of course not.

by safog 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

> Amazon algorithms for instance recommend "adult" fiction (with provocative cover art) amazon publishes way more than that, NSFW, google "chuck tingle". The famous author of "space raptor butt invasion", and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tingle https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tin...

recursive 6y ago
WTF is even real life. There are hundreds of them. https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Tingle/e/B00SF2MTYK One of my favorite titles is "Creamed In The Butt By My Handsome Living Corn"
mcphage 6y ago
> and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt" Don't forget the meta-level 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'
- walrus01 6y ago
  I'm waiting for "Pounded in the Butt by the Sexy Seattle Amazon Product Recommendation Algorithm"

nitrogen 6y ago

It's not even clear that there's a solution here beyond let the platforms exercise their best judgement and sort of muddle along. Ensuring a diversity of platforms with no one/two/three platforms controlling the vast majority of interaction would probably help.

root_axis 6y ago
People are free to use whatever platforms they want, you can't force the masses to use alternative platforms. Besides, the landscape is already very diverse, but the most popular platforms will always get the most media attention, it's not like using FB precludes the use of any other platform, most people who are active on social media are active on multiple sites. This just isn't a problem.
- boogies 6y ago
  > People are free to use whatever platforms they want 8.1 million people wanted to use Parler. Obviously to me they can get a GNU-powered phone and Parler could get ported and they’d be free to use it. >999‰ of them probably have no idea those exist. >99‰ of them probably don’t even know what “jailbreak” means or that it’s legal, and ~900‰ probably don’t know how to do it or that they have the ability to learn it.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    I have a Parler account. I've known about PinePhone, Librem 5, and other variants since their inceptions. I've jailbroken myriad devices for years. I don't know where this idea you have that there aren't technical people - extremely technical people - across the political spectrum comes from, but you should probably disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. What people want is 1) fair treatment regardless of political affiliation or belief and 2) ease of idea transmission. There's nothing stopping people from spinning up a VM across the thousands of cloud service providers and creating their own little corner of the web, but that doesn't give you nearly the engagement of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In fact, I'm willing to bet even the most trafficked personal websites don't get one-tenth of their associated YouTube / Snapchat / TikTok accounts. How many people go to TaylorSwift.com versus her YouTube channel? Her TikTok channel? Her Twitter page?

rootusrootus 6y ago

> So yeah, I think Zuck will be more than happy to say, please tell us what to allow on the platform and we'll follow it to the letter and deflect the blame to the regulators. He would never do that. He needs regular users to stay on the platform. The censorship isn't to appease government regulators, it's to keep from alienating regular people who don't want to be exposed to it. Deflecting blame to the regulators wouldn't stop users from leaving and heading to a platform that did more effective damage control.

safog 6y ago
He's been saying that pretty consistently for several years though.. too lazy to dig up the links. Regular users might be somewhat impacted (if their bill gates is tracking us through vaccines post gets removed for example) but most people I'd say just want to post their breakfast / travel photos on Facebook than deal with QAnon conspiracies.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ramoz 6y ago

I address this in another top comment as well. Just additional perspective. You can't predict the future, so you have to find the one thing(s) to protect in all cases. And like you say, it can not be subjective. In Gov't Tech Acquisitions regulation the single objective is to protect and enable small and disadvantage businesses. Perhaps it could be the same with platforms that propagate info, but there is risk in creating a competitive environment without some form of formal trust system. It does seem ambitious / hard to think about.

monadic3 6y ago

Why are people consuming news on facebook at all? The idea is ridiculous for exactly the scenario you spelled out. A space that caters to news and to baby photos is not a space that makes any sense to me.

paulmd 6y ago

Well, ultimately the law is interpreted by humans, concepts like "good-faith effort" and "bona fide" exist despite those not being something you can exactly define in a law. But judges know it when they see it and it's not actually a problem in practice. This is ultimately one of those things where computer scientists (specifically) freak out because the real world isn't zeroes and ones like they're used to, it's all shades of grey, but if you act in good taste it's probably not going to be a problem. Ban the cartel murderporn, show the aftermath of the bombing (or not, at your discretion), ban the nudists, but allow breastfeeding (or not, at your discretion), all of that sounds fine to me and we don't need to code an exact line into law. This is really a common thread in HN threads discussing anything touching on laws or regulation, because computer touchers just can't wrap their head around the idea that the law isn't absolutely precisely defined in a state machine and the judge and jury are going to apply human reasoning. But that's how the legal system works. I'm going to note that there is of course a degree of self-servingness in insisting that there be an exact line drawn. It's a way for Facebook to punt on actually having to moderate their platform and push that responsibility onto the courts, because they don't want to pay humans to deal with what is ultimately a human problem that needs to be solved in human ways. The nature of the world is that there are grey areas and some stuff in the grey area is fine and some stuff shouldn't be there, and it will take human intervention to decide which is which. If you don't want to pay to do that, and you want to be 100% on the green side of the line, then you will have to default to very aggressive censorship that will probably annoy users, but that's the price of being on a free platform that doesn't want to pay for adequate moderation.

safog 6y ago
I think what you're missing is that FB does employ an army of content moderators to decide if something passes their bar or not. And these are low wage, button clicking jobs along the lines of the AWS mechanical turk where without very explicit clear guidelines, you fall flat on your face. For context, reviewers apparently typically spend ~0-3 seconds to determine if a piece of content (mostly pictures) is acceptable. Given the pace of content creation, I'm amazed they even get that long, I assume algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting as well. Even if you have extremely smart reviewers, if your guidelines aren't clear and you leave it to the reviewer's interpretation, you'd likely get extremely inconsistent results and that feels like a worse product experience than having no moderation at all. So either have the govt decide these guidelines (esp. on political speech) and let them eat humblepie or let the platform do it and don't complain when they ban the POTUS.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

>... you need a team of lawyers to exercise judgement on if content is allowed or not allowed on a platform. No you don't. The platform is private property, they can decide whether or not they want such content, no lawyers needed. When someone gets banned or flagged on HN, does anyone mention lawyers getting involved? Of course not.