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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 def
by 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 agoI 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.