4 ms·

Content classification and moderation at scale is hard. I wish this article had provided more concrete statistics. > The group, formed in December, is private

Content classification and moderation at scale is hard. I wish this article had provided more concrete statistics. > The group, formed in December, is private and relatively small (57 members) but is still active, with four posts in the last month. We attempted to reach the administrator by email but did not receive a response. It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website.

afavour 5y ago
> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. I agree, but that's what Facebook said it would do. IMO the onus is on Facebook here. They promised to do something they surely knew they couldn't do. I suspect because the alternative is admitting that they don't really have any control over their recommendation algorithm, and the logical conclusion to that is to stop recommending things. But they don't ever want to do that because their engagement numbers would tank.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret their statement to mean that their user-submitted content classification would never be without fault. I think people are forgetting the scale of Facebook, or even the scale of the global internet population. If Facebook made a change to stop recommending groups that had been categorized as political, that’s a fair fulfillment of their statement. If some users are miscategorizing their user-created groups and some of those aren’t caught by automated filters and some of those are slipping into recommendations somewhere, we’re starting to play a game of “gotchas”. What do people actually want from Facebook? 100% perfect categorization of 100% user-generated content is impossible, and I think most people on HN understand that. So is there some degree of “good enough” that would be acceptable, or is this the type of issue that will generate outrage as long as someone can find an isolated exception somewhere? If it’s the latter, I think we’re bound to wear out the patience of reasonable people following along.
  - mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
    I think you touch on the core problem. That 100% perfect categorization is impossible. Also, it turns out that items which are false or angry are more likely to go viral, be it in science or politics: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-05-24/science-studies-most-likely-to-be-wrong-are-the-most-widely-read https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-05-24/... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57558028 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57558028 Unfortunately it turns out that we humans over-react, and over-spread, falsehoods. So I want both the "reshare and retweet" banned as features on social media platforms if section 230 protections are to remain. The solution isn't to encroach on the 1st amendment right to say anything you want. It's to take away the 'gasoline' of the reshare, that has an innate bias to falsehoods, from spreading them. That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision!
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      >>The solution isn't to encroach on the 1st amendment right to say anything you want. It's to take away the 'gasoline' of the reshare, that has an innate bias to falsehoods, from spreading them. How is the "gasoline" of resharing any different than forwarding an e-mail or retweeting? Copy+Paste has been here since Usenet. >>That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision! The real name requirement is part of what makes Facebook suck. It provides a false sense of security and creates an extra burden for those who have odd names like "Abcde" [1]. I don't see how Facebook is going to be able to determine whether a name in non-Latin letters is "real" or not. In 2004, Facebook was limited to a few Ivy League schools. Now it has 4e9 people to sort through. If governments have a hard time tracking even 1/4 that many people, even a panopticon like the Chinese state, what makes you think Facebook will find a solution to that problem? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abcde https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abcde
  - wavefunction 5y ago
delecti 5y ago
> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. Why is it reasonable for Facebook to promote content it hasn't classified?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  The same reason it’s reasonable for Hacker News to promote user-submitted links that have been voted up by users. Before being individually vetted ahead of time by moderators. Do we really want to go down the road of restricting websites from sharing user-generated content? That’s a non-starter for the free internet.
  - nend 5y ago
    That's not a fair comparison. Hacker News isn't making user based recommendations based on the content of the article or user preferences, Facebook is. FB's recommendation algorithm is tuned to promote (by their own admittance), divisive content because it promotes engagement. AND it's tuned based on specific user data. HN doesn't recommend specific content to specific users. It's based on site-wide upvotes, downvotes, and flagging, and doesn't take the actual content of the links in to account at all. I'm not saying you can legislate the difference and stop FB while keeping a free internet. But HN and FB are not remotely doing the same thing and is not an argument why it's fine for FB to continue doing what they're doing.
    - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > That's not a fair comparison. Hacker News isn't making user based recommendations based on the content of the article or user preferences, Facebook is. Okay, then consider Reddit. Or Twitter. Or YouTube. Or Spotify's podcast recommendations. or Netflix's what to watch next recommendations. Letting users indicate their interests and then receive recommendations according to their interests is core to every recommendation engine on the internet. Obviously we're not going to ban recommendations engines or disallow recommending content to users based on what they want to see.
CPLX 5y ago
We can demand companies do whatever we, as a society, deem important to do. If their scale and cost structure makes complying with that demand "impossible" then it's completely reasonably to propose that it's their scale and business model that's the problem, not the nature of the demand.
bun_at_work 5y ago
If moderating their content is necessary to maintain a healthy platform (in terms that our society determines), then their inability to moderate that content means they are too big and need to be cut down to a manageable size. What real good has Facebook done? Even the few examples that can be mustered don't compete with the ongoing damage it does to our society. If they can't handle these problems at this scale (global X-billion users scale) then they should scale down.
- nradov 5y ago
  As a society we don't restrict fundamental civil rights such as freedom of speech for individuals or corporations just because it might cause dune vaguely defined "damage". The legal bar is higher than that, as it should be.
  - cvwright 5y ago
    No but we do have anti-trust law
    - nradov 5y ago
      That's a non sequitur. Antitrust law has no relevance to content moderation policies or free speech rights.
      - cvwright 5y ago
        The argument was that Facebook is so big that they’re a danger. Limiting their speech is not compatible with US law, as you mention. So the proper solution is not to limit what they can say. It’s to stop them being so big that they are a danger.
        Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Who gets to decide what's "dangerous" and on what terms? What if I disagree with that assessment? What does my view count for?
bingidingi 5y ago
Then maybe they shouldn't allow everyone to create these groups on their platform. If I run a music venue, and every weekend I sell out 1,000 seats... BUT every weekend 1 person shoots another person... they're not going to let me keep having concerts. I can't throw my hands up and say "well there are just too many people at this event, I can't check them all for guns"
- nradov 5y ago
  That's a horrible comparison. Creating a political discussion group isn't a violent crime.
  - bingidingi 5y ago
    Running a music venue isn't a violent crime either, but if I'm failing to moderate and protect the space my business and its customers operate in... I won't have a business for long. My point is that their excuse of "there's too much volume for us to manage" is complete bologna. Any physical business with a similar issue would be forced to reduce volume to a rate that's manageable. If Facebook can't moderate their content effectively, then they need to either scale their moderation or reduce their content. I'm tired of this "well, it's a hard problem what are you going to do" nonsense.
erehweb 5y ago
The issue is that FB is not doing a good job - still recommending “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”, “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren”. Sure, it's non-trivial, but if these fall through the cracks, then you're not trying hard enough.
- erehweb 5y ago
  My guess is that there was a mixture of: 1) This not being a priority for FB 2) FB Eng / PM being too clever for its own good and not doing the obvious thing of substring matching ("not scalable"). (Arguably a part of (1) - if it's really important, you'd have the team to maintain a list of banned strings). 3) Just a plain old bug (although arguably this is a subcategory of (1)).
  - slipframe 5y ago
    > “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”, “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren” For classifying things like this as political, a typical bayesian 'spam' filter would perform very well.
mdoms 5y ago
> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website I think it's entirely reasonable[0]. I'm sick and tired of this bogus idea that large websites are simply too big to be moderated by human beings. It's bullshit propaganda that is invented by companies that don't want to spend the money to do it. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earnings-profit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earning...
ashneo76 5y ago
Yes it is when they go around marketing that they are the best social network out there It is when a billionaire and a company of chosen few can weild so much power over people everywhere

afavour 5y ago

> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. I agree, but that's what Facebook said it would do. IMO the onus is on Facebook here. They promised to do something they surely knew they couldn't do. I suspect because the alternative is admitting that they don't really have any control over their recommendation algorithm, and the logical conclusion to that is to stop recommending things. But they don't ever want to do that because their engagement numbers would tank.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret their statement to mean that their user-submitted content classification would never be without fault. I think people are forgetting the scale of Facebook, or even the scale of the global internet population. If Facebook made a change to stop recommending groups that had been categorized as political, that’s a fair fulfillment of their statement. If some users are miscategorizing their user-created groups and some of those aren’t caught by automated filters and some of those are slipping into recommendations somewhere, we’re starting to play a game of “gotchas”. What do people actually want from Facebook? 100% perfect categorization of 100% user-generated content is impossible, and I think most people on HN understand that. So is there some degree of “good enough” that would be acceptable, or is this the type of issue that will generate outrage as long as someone can find an isolated exception somewhere? If it’s the latter, I think we’re bound to wear out the patience of reasonable people following along.
- mrDmrTmrJ 5y ago
  I think you touch on the core problem. That 100% perfect categorization is impossible. Also, it turns out that items which are false or angry are more likely to go viral, be it in science or politics: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-05-24/science-studies-most-likely-to-be-wrong-are-the-most-widely-read https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-05-24/... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57558028 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57558028 Unfortunately it turns out that we humans over-react, and over-spread, falsehoods. So I want both the "reshare and retweet" banned as features on social media platforms if section 230 protections are to remain. The solution isn't to encroach on the 1st amendment right to say anything you want. It's to take away the 'gasoline' of the reshare, that has an innate bias to falsehoods, from spreading them. That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision!
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    >>The solution isn't to encroach on the 1st amendment right to say anything you want. It's to take away the 'gasoline' of the reshare, that has an innate bias to falsehoods, from spreading them. How is the "gasoline" of resharing any different than forwarding an e-mail or retweeting? Copy+Paste has been here since Usenet. >>That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision! The real name requirement is part of what makes Facebook suck. It provides a false sense of security and creates an extra burden for those who have odd names like "Abcde" [1]. I don't see how Facebook is going to be able to determine whether a name in non-Latin letters is "real" or not. In 2004, Facebook was limited to a few Ivy League schools. Now it has 4e9 people to sort through. If governments have a hard time tracking even 1/4 that many people, even a panopticon like the Chinese state, what makes you think Facebook will find a solution to that problem? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abcde https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abcde
- wavefunction 5y ago

delecti 5y ago

> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. Why is it reasonable for Facebook to promote content it hasn't classified?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The same reason it’s reasonable for Hacker News to promote user-submitted links that have been voted up by users. Before being individually vetted ahead of time by moderators. Do we really want to go down the road of restricting websites from sharing user-generated content? That’s a non-starter for the free internet.
- nend 5y ago
  That's not a fair comparison. Hacker News isn't making user based recommendations based on the content of the article or user preferences, Facebook is. FB's recommendation algorithm is tuned to promote (by their own admittance), divisive content because it promotes engagement. AND it's tuned based on specific user data. HN doesn't recommend specific content to specific users. It's based on site-wide upvotes, downvotes, and flagging, and doesn't take the actual content of the links in to account at all. I'm not saying you can legislate the difference and stop FB while keeping a free internet. But HN and FB are not remotely doing the same thing and is not an argument why it's fine for FB to continue doing what they're doing.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > That's not a fair comparison. Hacker News isn't making user based recommendations based on the content of the article or user preferences, Facebook is. Okay, then consider Reddit. Or Twitter. Or YouTube. Or Spotify's podcast recommendations. or Netflix's what to watch next recommendations. Letting users indicate their interests and then receive recommendations according to their interests is core to every recommendation engine on the internet. Obviously we're not going to ban recommendations engines or disallow recommending content to users based on what they want to see.

CPLX 5y ago

We can demand companies do whatever we, as a society, deem important to do. If their scale and cost structure makes complying with that demand "impossible" then it's completely reasonably to propose that it's their scale and business model that's the problem, not the nature of the demand.

bun_at_work 5y ago

If moderating their content is necessary to maintain a healthy platform (in terms that our society determines), then their inability to moderate that content means they are too big and need to be cut down to a manageable size. What real good has Facebook done? Even the few examples that can be mustered don't compete with the ongoing damage it does to our society. If they can't handle these problems at this scale (global X-billion users scale) then they should scale down.

nradov 5y ago
As a society we don't restrict fundamental civil rights such as freedom of speech for individuals or corporations just because it might cause dune vaguely defined "damage". The legal bar is higher than that, as it should be.
- cvwright 5y ago
  No but we do have anti-trust law
  - nradov 5y ago
    That's a non sequitur. Antitrust law has no relevance to content moderation policies or free speech rights.
    - cvwright 5y ago
      The argument was that Facebook is so big that they’re a danger. Limiting their speech is not compatible with US law, as you mention. So the proper solution is not to limit what they can say. It’s to stop them being so big that they are a danger.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        Who gets to decide what's "dangerous" and on what terms? What if I disagree with that assessment? What does my view count for?

bingidingi 5y ago

Then maybe they shouldn't allow everyone to create these groups on their platform. If I run a music venue, and every weekend I sell out 1,000 seats... BUT every weekend 1 person shoots another person... they're not going to let me keep having concerts. I can't throw my hands up and say "well there are just too many people at this event, I can't check them all for guns"

nradov 5y ago
That's a horrible comparison. Creating a political discussion group isn't a violent crime.
- bingidingi 5y ago
  Running a music venue isn't a violent crime either, but if I'm failing to moderate and protect the space my business and its customers operate in... I won't have a business for long. My point is that their excuse of "there's too much volume for us to manage" is complete bologna. Any physical business with a similar issue would be forced to reduce volume to a rate that's manageable. If Facebook can't moderate their content effectively, then they need to either scale their moderation or reduce their content. I'm tired of this "well, it's a hard problem what are you going to do" nonsense.

erehweb 5y ago

The issue is that FB is not doing a good job - still recommending “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”, “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren”. Sure, it's non-trivial, but if these fall through the cracks, then you're not trying hard enough.

erehweb 5y ago
My guess is that there was a mixture of: 1) This not being a priority for FB 2) FB Eng / PM being too clever for its own good and not doing the obvious thing of substring matching ("not scalable"). (Arguably a part of (1) - if it's really important, you'd have the team to maintain a list of banned strings). 3) Just a plain old bug (although arguably this is a subcategory of (1)).
- slipframe 5y ago
  > “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”, “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren” For classifying things like this as political, a typical bayesian 'spam' filter would perform very well.

mdoms 5y ago

> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website I think it's entirely reasonable[0]. I'm sick and tired of this bogus idea that large websites are simply too big to be moderated by human beings. It's bullshit propaganda that is invented by companies that don't want to spend the money to do it. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earnings-profit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earning...

ashneo76 5y ago

Yes it is when they go around marketing that they are the best social network out there It is when a billionaire and a company of chosen few can weild so much power over people everywhere