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Instagram launches hate-speech 'limits' to hide abuse

46 points by FridayoLeary 5y ago

stayfrosty420 5y ago
As with Blizzard, Facebook seem to have some deep aversion to manual moderation, and will spend millions on getting developers to make half-hearted attempts to automate it without actually solving the problem. This is a real band aid that will do nothing to dissuade people from continuing their abusive behaviour.
- post-it 5y ago
  Manual moderation scales linearly: for X posts per day, you need nX moderators, forever. Silicon Valley execs are allergic to anything that doesn't scale sub-linearly. It makes them feel like the singularity might not be around the corner.
- smeyer 5y ago
  >will spend millions on getting developers to make half-hearted attempts What do you think the annual cost of manual moderation would be?
  - hellomyguys 5y ago
    Facebook can afford manual moderation. What do you think the mental health cost of waiting for AI moderation to be good enough in 111 languages that understand the nuances of speech in text/audio/video?
    - smeyer 5y ago
      I'm not saying that the expense of manual moderation would excuse doing a poor job of moderating, but the top comment talked about spending "millions" on trying to automate moderation as if manual moderation wouldn't cost as much. They're certainly spending many millions on both manual and automatic moderation as it currently stands. They've spent tens of millions of dollars just settling with the human moderators for their job-related mental health issues https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-health https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content... .
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Manual moderation doesn't scale. It needs to be automated.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    If scales just fine. It's embarrassingly parallel even. It's not a scaling problem - it's a provisioning problem. And Facebook isn't willing to pay for it.
- thoughtstheseus 5y ago
  Manuel moderation is not the solution. The issue is FB (insta) is the one moderating. Give moderation powers to the users, create a market for moderation. Some people will want whitelists, others AI screening models, others “manual moderation”. Let users decide what they want.
  - namlem 5y ago
    YouTube tried that and people found ways to abuse it immediately. Organized groups started going around getting chennels they don't like banned on false pretenses.
    - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
      YouTube had differentiated moderation for each user based on personal preferences set by the user? I don’t recall that.
      - namlem 5y ago
        No, they tried just one of the methods you listed. Having it be set by user preference is an interesting idea, but whatever the default setting is will be used by the overwhelming majority of users and will be quickly subverted by attackers.
        thoughtstheseus 5y ago
        Gotcha. I agree any default setting needs to expect attackers. I’d set the default to whitelist content from Insta (so they manually approve it) and verified real people “friends” can white list additional content for you. If you want to open it up more you can and layer in content moderators for hire, AI models to try, dashboards to optimize what you want, etc.
    - biomcgary 5y ago
      The GP was probably suggesting letting bubbles of people moderate for those who opt in to the moderation. Thus, a channel would only be banned for people who are in the group. Analogously to real life, one doesn't have the option to choose all of ones neighbors, but you can choose the neighborhood you live in (assuming you have adequate wealth, redlining is illegal, etc). Moderation bubbles would enforce content rules much like an HOA enforces grass cutting, etc. I'm not sure how it would work out, but I'm curious if there are existing examples.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  > This is a real band aid that will do nothing to dissuade people from continuing their abusive behaviour. Band aid, yes. The only thing that will change behaviour is consequences. I don't verbally abuse people face to face because there is a non zero chance of being punched. I am almost entirely liberated from consequences in the online world. Online I can't see the person I'm abusing, I don't see their pain, I have zero chance of empathising with them. Even verified accounts wont help, if there are no consequences to me abusing someone. The next best thing is to hellban. (in my opinion.) The problem is, doing that at scale is exceptionally hard.
  - nova22033 5y ago
    I don't verbally abuse people face to face because there is a non zero chance of being punched Just so we're clear...if you live in the US, you absolutely have a right to stand on the street corner and abuse me as long as you're not likely to cause imminent lawless action...all of that without getting punched. You absolutely can call for all people of my ethnic/racial group to be deported(or worse). What you can't do is call for your followers to go kill me or burn down my house or any other lawless action. You DO NOT have a right to say those things on facebook/youtube. In case anyone was thinking of bring up the "fighting words exception", please read this https://www.thefire.org/misconceptions-about-the-fighting-words-exception/ https://www.thefire.org/misconceptions-about-the-fighting-wo...
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      He wasn't talking about legal rights, he was talking about real consequences.
      - KaiserPro 5y ago
        exactly this, I'm not talking about legal consequences. I'm talking about literally being punched in the face for saying something that you'd hear a 14 year old gamer shout over the microphone. In the real world, they'd never say it to my face, because they know I might tell their parents
  - 5y ago
- namlem 5y ago
  The aversion is due to cost. Simple as that. Manual moderation is simply too expensive.
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  There are literally not enough humans in the global workforce to moderate all the content that goes through Facebook's properties. Instagram alone has over 20k things posted per second.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  Facebook processes literally hundreds of millions of posts per day. The idea that it can be human-moderated is laughable.
  - minikites 5y ago
    So we should involve no humans at all? I think many people are clamoring for something instead of the status quo of nothing.
  - chrchang523 5y ago
    Not an endorsement, but you might want to take a look at the scale that human moderation is currently applied at in China.
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    If the alternative is doing nothing, then maybe we need to change the legal framework to make businesses like Facebook unsustainable.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Why should the size of a business be an excuse for that business to operate antisocially? We don't say "Dow chemical processes millions of gallons of waste fluid every day. The idea that they can avoid dumping most of it in a river is laughable". If Facebook can't profitably operate their business in a way that is acceptable to the society they operate within, they don't have some inherent right to a profit.
    - caymanjim 5y ago
      I didn't say it was acceptable. I hope they all implode.
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    It can be. There is a button to flag posts. Moderation can prioritize by the flagging and the amount of flags a post gets. Considering how many analysis is done onto the facebook users, it should be relatively easy to come up with a scoring system. Could be as simply as how often a post by a certain user is flagged (and potentially removed by moderators). Also just randomly check posts can be effective, if consequential action is taken. Yes, this is some effort and will cost money. But we are talking about hugely large and profitable companies here. While it might not be possible to "solve" the issue entirely, it could get a lot better if done thoroughly.
- strangeattractr 5y ago
  Everything is a bandaid when you're policing what people say. Manual moderation is unlikely to solve the issue to people's liking either, it doesn't on here or anywhere else I see it done. Moderation on social media isn't something that can be solved satisfactorily, everyone is always unhappy with it. Take the lab leak theory with COVID, originally Facebook came under fire for allowing misinformation to spread so was blocking content which contained this claim because it was considered harmful but they reversed course once traditional media such as Vanity Fair began reporting it. Regardless of where you stand on this, you're unhappy with what they did. Even hate speech is pretty ambiguous. The issue is one of subjective interpretation. Some comments are unambiguously hateful, others are hateful to some and not to others due to their cultural context which is important when you consider that these are global platforms. I've found it much easier to not use them than worry about what's on them.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > Manual moderation is unlikely to solve the issue to people's liking either, it doesn't on here or anywhere else I see it done. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the human-approach of HN mods is _the_ reason this site is better and different from other social/forum sites.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      HN is a fairly ideologically homogeneous community. Moderating it is "easy mode" compared to FB or somewhere else that has a broader cross section of the population.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    The point of moderation is not to make everyone happy. It’s to maximize profit, which is a second order effect of the size and engagement of the user base. If assholes are being toxic on your platform, that might be good for a while — until people start leaving and the media starts reporting on it. If someone is being an asshole to other patrons in a bar, they get thrown out. No one worries about whether they’re happy with the decision. No one says “actually their comments are only subjectively asshole-ish.” We make these judgments constantly, in basically every arena in life. Why do we start wringing our hands when it comes to online platforms?
- Kalium 5y ago
  How many people do you think it would take to meaningfully apply manual moderation at the scale of Blizzard, Facebook, or Instagram? How many more people in support staff? How much do you think this would cost? How well do you think that cost would stack up against spending millions on half-hearted automated moderation?
- 13years 5y ago
  The real problem is that no company is qualified to be the moral arbiter of all society. All such attempts are doomed to fail as the only success will be the furtherance of our dystopia.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    They don't have to be the moral arbiter of all society, just moderate their own users. The problem is that they want all society to become their users. They are biting off more than they can chew, to the detriment of civil society.
    - krapp 5y ago
      >The problem is that they want all society to become their users. That's not a problem. Even if all society became Instagram users, Instagram couldn't act as the moral arbiters of all society, they can still only moderate their own users on their own platform. Substitute that with any platform, including Facebook and its billions of followers. Facebook isn't society. Facebook hasn't replaced or supplanted governments, doesn't control the media, doesn't burn books or dissidents, doesn't censor any of the countless alternative means of communication that exist. No matter how big Facebook gets, Facebook can only control Facebook.
      - 13years 5y ago
        Even Facebook itself doesn't have this viewpoint. They are openly acknowledging they want to influence behavior in the real world outside of the mere use of just the Facebook app.
        krapp 5y ago
        I don't know what specifically you're referring to. A lot of companies make bold claims about wanting to "change the world" and whatnot. I'm not aware of any public Facebook policy where they acknowledge wanting to take over all governments, control all thought and communication, and act as the sole arbiters of truth and morality for society.
- zucker42 5y ago
  I hardly think Facebook has a deep aversion to manual moderation, considering that I've read they employ around 15,000 manual moderators.[1] However, you may still be right that this is the wrong approach in this case. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-facebook-content-moderation-mistakes-daily-report-says/?sh=4c48454154d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-...
rc_mob 5y ago
Seems logical. long time followers will be more levelheaded on average
uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
I think if a dharma system allowed for a backing up of speach with dharma points (+5 your point - so it will only be hidden after 5 downvotes) - that would allow for the goodwill earned to become the goodwill spend. PS: Or just dang it. Aka moderate by hand with love from above.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
notyourday 5y ago
I had my first experience with it today. I used a yiddishism in a comment on a post about one of yiddish institutions and was greeted with a hate speech pop-up. IG is definitely going to purge quite a lot of colloquialisms with it.
- Scaevolus 5y ago
  It's probably the same sort of dumb bag-of-words classifier that made Google's toxic speech identifier classify sentences like "I am gay" as "extremely toxic". You give each word a score and sum them together, completely ignoring context and meaning.
- el-salvador 5y ago
  People from Spanish speaking countries have had their FB accounts limited for asking about black ink cartridges for HP printers or black HP printers in computer supply pages. https://larepublica.pe/tecnologia/2020/06/14/facebook-volvio-a-bloquear-a-otro-usuario-por-buscar-tintes-de-impresora-negra-hp-fotos-redes-sociales/ https://larepublica.pe/tecnologia/2020/06/14/facebook-volvio... https://www.fayerwayer.com/2020/09/facebook-imagen-maldita-bloqueen/ https://www.fayerwayer.com/2020/09/facebook-imagen-maldita-b...
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    That's appallingly ango-centric.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  So weird, why would a yiddishism have a negative speech score? Edit: realizing this comes across as sarcastically anti-Semitic. This is a genuine question, I don't understand why a yiddishism would carry such connotations in the automated hate speech system.
  - chudi 5y ago
    In the context of the last trend of nlp a word is defined by its context, if a word is mostly used as a derogatory term in the corpus that the model has been trained it will most likely be used as a flag to classify the content as hatespeech
protoman3000 5y ago
With how social media turned out to be, is there any sustainable benefit for the users in participating? Users locked themselves into a system that provides abusers and other trolls a very direct access endpoint into the user‘s emotion. If you receive suddenly 10.000 intimidating messages - even if Instagram now hides them automatically one click away - you still will feel very agitated and it might ruin you day, night or even life substantially. Mind, that there is a substantial imbalance which results in a situation of duress for the user: The user gardened their profile in the social network over a very long time, decades even, on arguably more than a daily basis and will perceive very high cost if they remove themselves from the social network. Meanwhile the abusers can create new accounts and doxx the users with virtually no cost. Users locked themselves into a system that siphons out any personal information they willingly and unwillingly give up and which is used directly to manipulate or trick the user into changing their behavior towards whatever the social media wants. Users locked themselves into a system that fosters a show off culture and spreads a fake perception of reality and feelings of envy, inferiority and vanity. Continued and sustained usage leads to dependency and depression. Not even to talk about how the culture of political discussion and bubble of misinformation harmed our democracy. What do the users get from this? What do we get from this? Why should anybody use social media? Why shouldn’t we see social media as a public health issue?
- _ph_ 5y ago
  I am using social media to be - social. My facebook friends are mostly composed of people I have interacted with in real life first. I use Instagram/Facebook to display the photos I want to publicly share, easiest way to get some audience, especially people I know. I use Twitter mostly as a news service to follow people whom I know to post interesting content. Especially Twitter can be a valuable source of very up to date information if you have a trending hash tag. E.g. with the recent flood disaster in Germany, you could get a stream of posts from the affected areas. The trending hash tag can though be quite a snake pit, as, depending on the tag, a lot of bad posts can appear too, there are a lot of hash tags to avoid :)
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    That isn't how life is supposed to be, you're manipulating your image and selling a version of yourself that isn't truly you. Twitter is also not news.
gentle 5y ago
This is a terrible way of handling it. Hiding comments? Flag abuse and ban people. Why is that so hard?
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Because they make money from outrage.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  You're putting the onus on the individual to identify and flag abuse, meaning they still have to experience it. If you're trying to say that automatically flagging all abuse correctly isn't hard then I don't think you appreciate the problem.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Can we just admit that making social media a "global town square" has been a horrific mistake, and just move on?
- koolaidman 5y ago
  Gross oversimplifications like these that are barely related to the specifics of the article somewhat make your point
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    nice
HNisBaizuo 5y ago
Social media made the promise that it can handle all the big meanies. The only people who are surprised and upset that social media was unable to stop or reform the human condition are those who genuinely believed digital technology would conquer everything. No amount of bits will stop human discontent.

46 points by FridayoLeary 5y ago

As with Blizzard, Facebook seem to have some deep aversion to manual moderation, and will spend millions on getting developers to make half-hearted attempts to automate it without actually solving the problem. This is a real band aid that will do nothing to dissuade people from continuing their abusive behaviour.

post-it 5y ago
Manual moderation scales linearly: for X posts per day, you need nX moderators, forever. Silicon Valley execs are allergic to anything that doesn't scale sub-linearly. It makes them feel like the singularity might not be around the corner.
smeyer 5y ago
>will spend millions on getting developers to make half-hearted attempts What do you think the annual cost of manual moderation would be?
- hellomyguys 5y ago
  Facebook can afford manual moderation. What do you think the mental health cost of waiting for AI moderation to be good enough in 111 languages that understand the nuances of speech in text/audio/video?
  - smeyer 5y ago
    I'm not saying that the expense of manual moderation would excuse doing a poor job of moderating, but the top comment talked about spending "millions" on trying to automate moderation as if manual moderation wouldn't cost as much. They're certainly spending many millions on both manual and automatic moderation as it currently stands. They've spent tens of millions of dollars just settling with the human moderators for their job-related mental health issues https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-health https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content... .
MattGaiser 5y ago
Manual moderation doesn't scale. It needs to be automated.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  If scales just fine. It's embarrassingly parallel even. It's not a scaling problem - it's a provisioning problem. And Facebook isn't willing to pay for it.
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
Manuel moderation is not the solution. The issue is FB (insta) is the one moderating. Give moderation powers to the users, create a market for moderation. Some people will want whitelists, others AI screening models, others “manual moderation”. Let users decide what they want.
- namlem 5y ago
  YouTube tried that and people found ways to abuse it immediately. Organized groups started going around getting chennels they don't like banned on false pretenses.
  - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
    YouTube had differentiated moderation for each user based on personal preferences set by the user? I don’t recall that.
    - namlem 5y ago
      No, they tried just one of the methods you listed. Having it be set by user preference is an interesting idea, but whatever the default setting is will be used by the overwhelming majority of users and will be quickly subverted by attackers.
      - thoughtstheseus 5y ago
        Gotcha. I agree any default setting needs to expect attackers. I’d set the default to whitelist content from Insta (so they manually approve it) and verified real people “friends” can white list additional content for you. If you want to open it up more you can and layer in content moderators for hire, AI models to try, dashboards to optimize what you want, etc.
  - biomcgary 5y ago
    The GP was probably suggesting letting bubbles of people moderate for those who opt in to the moderation. Thus, a channel would only be banned for people who are in the group. Analogously to real life, one doesn't have the option to choose all of ones neighbors, but you can choose the neighborhood you live in (assuming you have adequate wealth, redlining is illegal, etc). Moderation bubbles would enforce content rules much like an HOA enforces grass cutting, etc. I'm not sure how it would work out, but I'm curious if there are existing examples.
KaiserPro 5y ago
> This is a real band aid that will do nothing to dissuade people from continuing their abusive behaviour. Band aid, yes. The only thing that will change behaviour is consequences. I don't verbally abuse people face to face because there is a non zero chance of being punched. I am almost entirely liberated from consequences in the online world. Online I can't see the person I'm abusing, I don't see their pain, I have zero chance of empathising with them. Even verified accounts wont help, if there are no consequences to me abusing someone. The next best thing is to hellban. (in my opinion.) The problem is, doing that at scale is exceptionally hard.
- nova22033 5y ago
  I don't verbally abuse people face to face because there is a non zero chance of being punched Just so we're clear...if you live in the US, you absolutely have a right to stand on the street corner and abuse me as long as you're not likely to cause imminent lawless action...all of that without getting punched. You absolutely can call for all people of my ethnic/racial group to be deported(or worse). What you can't do is call for your followers to go kill me or burn down my house or any other lawless action. You DO NOT have a right to say those things on facebook/youtube. In case anyone was thinking of bring up the "fighting words exception", please read this https://www.thefire.org/misconceptions-about-the-fighting-words-exception/ https://www.thefire.org/misconceptions-about-the-fighting-wo...
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    He wasn't talking about legal rights, he was talking about real consequences.
    - KaiserPro 5y ago
      exactly this, I'm not talking about legal consequences. I'm talking about literally being punched in the face for saying something that you'd hear a 14 year old gamer shout over the microphone. In the real world, they'd never say it to my face, because they know I might tell their parents
- 5y ago
namlem 5y ago
The aversion is due to cost. Simple as that. Manual moderation is simply too expensive.
mgraczyk 5y ago
There are literally not enough humans in the global workforce to moderate all the content that goes through Facebook's properties. Instagram alone has over 20k things posted per second.
caymanjim 5y ago
Facebook processes literally hundreds of millions of posts per day. The idea that it can be human-moderated is laughable.
- minikites 5y ago
  So we should involve no humans at all? I think many people are clamoring for something instead of the status quo of nothing.
- chrchang523 5y ago
  Not an endorsement, but you might want to take a look at the scale that human moderation is currently applied at in China.
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  If the alternative is doing nothing, then maybe we need to change the legal framework to make businesses like Facebook unsustainable.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Why should the size of a business be an excuse for that business to operate antisocially? We don't say "Dow chemical processes millions of gallons of waste fluid every day. The idea that they can avoid dumping most of it in a river is laughable". If Facebook can't profitably operate their business in a way that is acceptable to the society they operate within, they don't have some inherent right to a profit.
  - caymanjim 5y ago
    I didn't say it was acceptable. I hope they all implode.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  It can be. There is a button to flag posts. Moderation can prioritize by the flagging and the amount of flags a post gets. Considering how many analysis is done onto the facebook users, it should be relatively easy to come up with a scoring system. Could be as simply as how often a post by a certain user is flagged (and potentially removed by moderators). Also just randomly check posts can be effective, if consequential action is taken. Yes, this is some effort and will cost money. But we are talking about hugely large and profitable companies here. While it might not be possible to "solve" the issue entirely, it could get a lot better if done thoroughly.
strangeattractr 5y ago
Everything is a bandaid when you're policing what people say. Manual moderation is unlikely to solve the issue to people's liking either, it doesn't on here or anywhere else I see it done. Moderation on social media isn't something that can be solved satisfactorily, everyone is always unhappy with it. Take the lab leak theory with COVID, originally Facebook came under fire for allowing misinformation to spread so was blocking content which contained this claim because it was considered harmful but they reversed course once traditional media such as Vanity Fair began reporting it. Regardless of where you stand on this, you're unhappy with what they did. Even hate speech is pretty ambiguous. The issue is one of subjective interpretation. Some comments are unambiguously hateful, others are hateful to some and not to others due to their cultural context which is important when you consider that these are global platforms. I've found it much easier to not use them than worry about what's on them.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > Manual moderation is unlikely to solve the issue to people's liking either, it doesn't on here or anywhere else I see it done. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the human-approach of HN mods is _the_ reason this site is better and different from other social/forum sites.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    HN is a fairly ideologically homogeneous community. Moderating it is "easy mode" compared to FB or somewhere else that has a broader cross section of the population.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  The point of moderation is not to make everyone happy. It’s to maximize profit, which is a second order effect of the size and engagement of the user base. If assholes are being toxic on your platform, that might be good for a while — until people start leaving and the media starts reporting on it. If someone is being an asshole to other patrons in a bar, they get thrown out. No one worries about whether they’re happy with the decision. No one says “actually their comments are only subjectively asshole-ish.” We make these judgments constantly, in basically every arena in life. Why do we start wringing our hands when it comes to online platforms?
Kalium 5y ago
How many people do you think it would take to meaningfully apply manual moderation at the scale of Blizzard, Facebook, or Instagram? How many more people in support staff? How much do you think this would cost? How well do you think that cost would stack up against spending millions on half-hearted automated moderation?
13years 5y ago
The real problem is that no company is qualified to be the moral arbiter of all society. All such attempts are doomed to fail as the only success will be the furtherance of our dystopia.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  They don't have to be the moral arbiter of all society, just moderate their own users. The problem is that they want all society to become their users. They are biting off more than they can chew, to the detriment of civil society.
  - krapp 5y ago
    >The problem is that they want all society to become their users. That's not a problem. Even if all society became Instagram users, Instagram couldn't act as the moral arbiters of all society, they can still only moderate their own users on their own platform. Substitute that with any platform, including Facebook and its billions of followers. Facebook isn't society. Facebook hasn't replaced or supplanted governments, doesn't control the media, doesn't burn books or dissidents, doesn't censor any of the countless alternative means of communication that exist. No matter how big Facebook gets, Facebook can only control Facebook.
    - 13years 5y ago
      Even Facebook itself doesn't have this viewpoint. They are openly acknowledging they want to influence behavior in the real world outside of the mere use of just the Facebook app.
      - krapp 5y ago
        I don't know what specifically you're referring to. A lot of companies make bold claims about wanting to "change the world" and whatnot. I'm not aware of any public Facebook policy where they acknowledge wanting to take over all governments, control all thought and communication, and act as the sole arbiters of truth and morality for society.
zucker42 5y ago
I hardly think Facebook has a deep aversion to manual moderation, considering that I've read they employ around 15,000 manual moderators.[1] However, you may still be right that this is the wrong approach in this case. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-facebook-content-moderation-mistakes-daily-report-says/?sh=4c48454154d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-...

rc_mob 5y ago

Seems logical. long time followers will be more levelheaded on average

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago

I think if a dharma system allowed for a backing up of speach with dharma points (+5 your point - so it will only be hidden after 5 downvotes) - that would allow for the goodwill earned to become the goodwill spend. PS: Or just dang it. Aka moderate by hand with love from above.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

notyourday 5y ago

I had my first experience with it today. I used a yiddishism in a comment on a post about one of yiddish institutions and was greeted with a hate speech pop-up. IG is definitely going to purge quite a lot of colloquialisms with it.

Scaevolus 5y ago
It's probably the same sort of dumb bag-of-words classifier that made Google's toxic speech identifier classify sentences like "I am gay" as "extremely toxic". You give each word a score and sum them together, completely ignoring context and meaning.
el-salvador 5y ago
People from Spanish speaking countries have had their FB accounts limited for asking about black ink cartridges for HP printers or black HP printers in computer supply pages. https://larepublica.pe/tecnologia/2020/06/14/facebook-volvio-a-bloquear-a-otro-usuario-por-buscar-tintes-de-impresora-negra-hp-fotos-redes-sociales/ https://larepublica.pe/tecnologia/2020/06/14/facebook-volvio... https://www.fayerwayer.com/2020/09/facebook-imagen-maldita-bloqueen/ https://www.fayerwayer.com/2020/09/facebook-imagen-maldita-b...
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  That's appallingly ango-centric.
TchoBeer 5y ago
So weird, why would a yiddishism have a negative speech score? Edit: realizing this comes across as sarcastically anti-Semitic. This is a genuine question, I don't understand why a yiddishism would carry such connotations in the automated hate speech system.
- chudi 5y ago
  In the context of the last trend of nlp a word is defined by its context, if a word is mostly used as a derogatory term in the corpus that the model has been trained it will most likely be used as a flag to classify the content as hatespeech

protoman3000 5y ago

With how social media turned out to be, is there any sustainable benefit for the users in participating? Users locked themselves into a system that provides abusers and other trolls a very direct access endpoint into the user‘s emotion. If you receive suddenly 10.000 intimidating messages - even if Instagram now hides them automatically one click away - you still will feel very agitated and it might ruin you day, night or even life substantially. Mind, that there is a substantial imbalance which results in a situation of duress for the user: The user gardened their profile in the social network over a very long time, decades even, on arguably more than a daily basis and will perceive very high cost if they remove themselves from the social network. Meanwhile the abusers can create new accounts and doxx the users with virtually no cost. Users locked themselves into a system that siphons out any personal information they willingly and unwillingly give up and which is used directly to manipulate or trick the user into changing their behavior towards whatever the social media wants. Users locked themselves into a system that fosters a show off culture and spreads a fake perception of reality and feelings of envy, inferiority and vanity. Continued and sustained usage leads to dependency and depression. Not even to talk about how the culture of political discussion and bubble of misinformation harmed our democracy. What do the users get from this? What do we get from this? Why should anybody use social media? Why shouldn’t we see social media as a public health issue?

_ph_ 5y ago
I am using social media to be - social. My facebook friends are mostly composed of people I have interacted with in real life first. I use Instagram/Facebook to display the photos I want to publicly share, easiest way to get some audience, especially people I know. I use Twitter mostly as a news service to follow people whom I know to post interesting content. Especially Twitter can be a valuable source of very up to date information if you have a trending hash tag. E.g. with the recent flood disaster in Germany, you could get a stream of posts from the affected areas. The trending hash tag can though be quite a snake pit, as, depending on the tag, a lot of bad posts can appear too, there are a lot of hash tags to avoid :)
- rootsudo 5y ago
  That isn't how life is supposed to be, you're manipulating your image and selling a version of yourself that isn't truly you. Twitter is also not news.

gentle 5y ago

This is a terrible way of handling it. Hiding comments? Flag abuse and ban people. Why is that so hard?

rubyist5eva 5y ago
Because they make money from outrage.
jensensbutton 5y ago
You're putting the onus on the individual to identify and flag abuse, meaning they still have to experience it. If you're trying to say that automatically flagging all abuse correctly isn't hard then I don't think you appreciate the problem.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Can we just admit that making social media a "global town square" has been a horrific mistake, and just move on?

koolaidman 5y ago
Gross oversimplifications like these that are barely related to the specifics of the article somewhat make your point
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  nice

HNisBaizuo 5y ago

Social media made the promise that it can handle all the big meanies. The only people who are surprised and upset that social media was unable to stop or reform the human condition are those who genuinely believed digital technology would conquer everything. No amount of bits will stop human discontent.