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This is a non-story. Someone on twitter wrote: > There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is pra

This is a non-story. Someone on twitter wrote: > There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practices, it not an expression of freedom or dignity, but of the failure of a society to accompany people on their "way of the cross" Twitter then flagged it for "promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm". Obviously it is not, but this is a rather complicated sentence and I can imagine a false positive from AI. It sounds like it was appealed and then a human upheld the flag, but hey, I can't imagine that the person who upheld this honestly understood the sentence either. This is not "wokeness" or "cancel culture" as the post here describes... just bad moderation. They need to hire @dang.

forty 6y ago
Exactly, that seems to be the obvious explanation to me as well. I don't know what this website is, but it looks like they really want me to subscribe, and I guess they need some content to make me think there is a problem they are solving :)
yanderekko 6y ago
Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture, especially if its manifestation in practice exhibits biases in the expected fashion. This is actually a major problem with arguments that try to dismiss the need to have ideological diversity in these institutions - cancel culture can arise from genuine good faith moderation if those moderators also happen to just have extremely biased ideological priors, eg. "we need to fight back" is taken as a literal threat of violence when said by the outgroup but not by the ingroup. In this case, I think we need to be vigilant against NLP models meant to flag content that may not explicitly build in ideological biases but incorporate feedback loops that will reinforce them - eg. they're meant to detect posts that will likely be flagged by users / human moderators, but the baseline flag rates are ideologically-biased. Unsurprisingly, the woke are perfectly able to understand these concerns when it comes to concerns about say AI coming to exhibit latent racial biases. But when the same mechanisms may cause ideological biases there's a telling lack of concern.
- chadash 6y ago
  > Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture Maybe, but this is a bad example of it. Flagging posts that encourage suicide isn't a left vs. right issue... it seems pretty bipartisan to me. The fact that the AI made a mistake on a single example here isn't even indicative of bad AI... this could happen (and did happen in this case on appeal) with human moderators too.
  - yanderekko 6y ago
    Yeah, I do agree that in this instance you're probably correct. That said, it also isn't clear to me what in the tweet is easily mistaken for advocating self-harm - obviously keywords like "dying", "assisted suicide" and "failure" are probably playing a part but are not jointly sufficient. It could be that there's additional contextual information that could be seen as ideologically-valenced and that contributed to this moderation action, but we'll never really know. For example, maybe the tweet caused a lot of harsh backlash for ideological reasons and that makes it more likely for Twitter to action a post for any reason, and the model is just making a softmax prediction of what that reason is. That's something that we should find discomforting.
whiddershins 6y ago
Except the article also indicates he appealed and the appeal was denied.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Never forget who is advocating for more censorship in the west.

forty 6y ago

Exactly, that seems to be the obvious explanation to me as well. I don't know what this website is, but it looks like they really want me to subscribe, and I guess they need some content to make me think there is a problem they are solving :)

yanderekko 6y ago

Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture, especially if its manifestation in practice exhibits biases in the expected fashion. This is actually a major problem with arguments that try to dismiss the need to have ideological diversity in these institutions - cancel culture can arise from genuine good faith moderation if those moderators also happen to just have extremely biased ideological priors, eg. "we need to fight back" is taken as a literal threat of violence when said by the outgroup but not by the ingroup. In this case, I think we need to be vigilant against NLP models meant to flag content that may not explicitly build in ideological biases but incorporate feedback loops that will reinforce them - eg. they're meant to detect posts that will likely be flagged by users / human moderators, but the baseline flag rates are ideologically-biased. Unsurprisingly, the woke are perfectly able to understand these concerns when it comes to concerns about say AI coming to exhibit latent racial biases. But when the same mechanisms may cause ideological biases there's a telling lack of concern.

chadash 6y ago
> Systematic bad moderation can be tantamount to wokeness / cancel culture Maybe, but this is a bad example of it. Flagging posts that encourage suicide isn't a left vs. right issue... it seems pretty bipartisan to me. The fact that the AI made a mistake on a single example here isn't even indicative of bad AI... this could happen (and did happen in this case on appeal) with human moderators too.
- yanderekko 6y ago
  Yeah, I do agree that in this instance you're probably correct. That said, it also isn't clear to me what in the tweet is easily mistaken for advocating self-harm - obviously keywords like "dying", "assisted suicide" and "failure" are probably playing a part but are not jointly sufficient. It could be that there's additional contextual information that could be seen as ideologically-valenced and that contributed to this moderation action, but we'll never really know. For example, maybe the tweet caused a lot of harsh backlash for ideological reasons and that makes it more likely for Twitter to action a post for any reason, and the model is just making a softmax prediction of what that reason is. That's something that we should find discomforting.

whiddershins 6y ago

Except the article also indicates he appealed and the appeal was denied.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Never forget who is advocating for more censorship in the west.