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Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
- rvz 5y agoFacebook IS the problem. Discuss.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aero-glide2 5y agoPerhaps it's just me, but reddit front page is much more toxic and filled with misinformation compared to most Facebook groups. (Niche subs are really good though).
- actually_a_dog 5y agoThat depends heavily on what subreddits you subscribe to, though. If you unsubscribe most of the news and politics subs, it can be pretty nice.
- rvz 5y agoThe biggest one in terms of users is Facebook. Everyone has given Facebook so many chances to change for years and yet, they are incapable of changing. Not even the fines are scaring them. They are so tiny, they are laughing at them whilst they rake in billions in revenue. They will never change and it will only get worse. They are the problem.
- fallingknife 5y agoIf what fb does makes tons of money and doesn't break the law, why would you expect them to change? And sure you can say well change the law. But the law that lets them do it is the 1st amendment.
- rndmind 5y agoI'm sure there's a logical fallacy in here somewhere.... scratches head
- sdrawkcabmai 5y agoPaywalled unfortunately. found this summary one: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secret-elite-from-its-content-rules-wsj https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...
- actually_a_dog 5y agohttps://archive.is/K5yv5 https://archive.is/K5yv5
- literallyaduck 5y ago"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" Animal Farm - George Orwell
- sdrawkcabmai 5y agoFacebook is the most explicitly duplicitious sociopathic company in the tech sector. Many companies are sociopathic, especially as you get into pure finance companies like PE firms, but few are as duplicitous as Facebook.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoThat's why they're on my "wouldn't work for them if they wee the last tech company in the entire world" list. That list isn't long, but, FB is near the top of it.
- mtnGoat 5y agoAgreed, I’d rather go back to manual labor then feed that machine. I’d done manual labor before, it’s sucks and the pay is low, but it sure beats selling your soul for a few greenbacks.
- paulluuk 5y agowhat other companies are on your list?
- lanstin 5y agoAny company that is mainly paid for by advertising, especially if they seem to have big data/ML chops.
- tristor 5y agoAgreed. I have a similar list, it's not super long, but most of the FAAMG are on it, and Facebook is #1 on the "will never" list. Everybody has a price, but some things are non-negotiable.
- CiPHPerCoder 5y agoThis tracks with their other choices and behaviors, unfortunately.
- 8b16380d 5y agoIs this really surprising? I have always assumed bad faith.
- jmnicolas 5y agoNo but now we have proof.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago> Those included in the XCheck program, according to Facebook documents, include, in top row: Neymar, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg, and in bottom row, Elizabeth Warren, Dan Scavino, Candace Owens and Doug the Pug.
- xwdv 5y agoUnfortunately Facebook has no choice. If you do not make your platform appealing for popular people you will have a hard time attracting their followers there.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThat is a textbook example of a choice.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAnd of a false dichotomy.
- pnemonic 5y agoHow unfortunate it is that such a thing is seen as a "rock and a hard place". Making less money might just be the worst thing possible for a corporation like Facebook.
- yann2 5y agoThe elite use facebook?
- napolux 5y agoThis is a very good question. What if I'm an Hollywood superstar or an NBA player or a billionaire and I want to chat and share stuff privately with my "colleagues". Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
- gilj 5y agoAsk yourself what you would use if you didn't want the general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just use direct messaging apps.
- adolph 5y agoMitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that uses the moniker “Pierre Delecto.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-delecto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-del...
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoI liked that, you FINALLY got a taste of the Real Romney. I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
- adolph 5y ago
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoElite in the title might make you think they mean a politician or celebrity. It’s really Facebook outsourcing to “XCheck” who has 5.8 million memebers and somehow avoids Facebook’s “moderation”.
- donatj 5y agoI don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI suspect it is automated. A computer can easily flag calling someone a loser. Not sure if FB has burning animals as a automated flag yet.
- donatj 5y agoI had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it. From the support response: > The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it. Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
- hirako2000 5y agoYes. Precisely. I think it is because the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate. If we observe the trend, the pull down are proportionate to the strength of the retaliators. Being against say LGBT isn't the same as being anti christian. Hit a particular group of people or ideology, the bans are well automated at this point.
- adolph 5y ago> the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate Tell that to my garden. (I don't condone messing with wildlife in any way. However, I would like my arugula to grow up not behind bars.)
- hirako2000 5y ago
- AlexandrB 5y ago> In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.” Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.
- dado3212 5y agoThis kind of makes sense. For every high profile person posting an ML-flagged “Napalm Girl” in the context of discussion around the Vietnam war, there’s thousands of instances of real child porn.
- alanlammiman 5y agoit cuts both ways. for every high profile person posting real porn (eg Neymar's revenge porn in the article) there are thousands of instances of regular users with ML flagged 'napalm girls'
- antonzabirko 5y agoWell of course. Why wouldn't they? Money and friends aside, they have to do it for people who wield power like China's upper echelon or the NSA. If they say no, they will be shut down in those markets.
- cycrutchfield 5y agoFacebook is already shut down in China, I’m not sure what you mean.
- antonzabirko 5y agoThen to put it more simply, large companies must tow to influential requests because that influence determines the flow of money. Govt, private, or individual -- doesn't matter. And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.
- dogleash 5y ago>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smoldesu 5y agoEvery FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not only do they likely profit off the success of Facebook, there are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it's wrapped up with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.
- sdrawkcabmai 5y agoWhy out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
- castis 5y agoI dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI recall Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to have lied a ton.
- smoldesu 5y agoApple says privacy is a human right, too. Companies failing to put their money where their mouth is has become par for the course.
- aquir 5y agoFacebook should be banned on DNS level…
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoI will jump on this bandwagon and say color me not surprised. The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military. That is not a good state of affairs.
- ep103 5y agoBecause we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them. From neonics and bees to misinformation and facebook. But our political class has adopted a policy that demands no action be taken, as that is the official policy position on all free-market related issues for one of the two major political parties. So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops. Which means societal trust drops. And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
- rajin444 5y agoGiving more power to those abusing it is not going to create trust. Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
- rektide 5y ago> Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them. in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network. we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition. personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.
- btbuildem 5y agoHow naive do you have to be to believe them at face value? Of course they're opportunistic liars. The best thing to do with Facebook is to nuke their data centres and incarcerate the execs and board members.
- alvarlagerlof 5y agoTake it easy...
- dang 5y agoPlease stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly please don't fulminate or post flamebait. It's all against the site guidelines, and not what this site is for. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Camillo 5y agoSo it's like the bluecheck on Twitter, but not visible to users?
- adolph 5y agoWe all live in Jenny Holzer's world, "Abuse of power should come as no surprise" edition: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
- commandlinefan 5y agoI suspect you would find the same of Twitter.
- caseysoftware 5y agoHow does this track against Section 230? Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
- runako 5y agoIANAL, but Section 230 reads pretty clearly to me. Which part of 230 do you think might apply here? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
- owl_troupe 5y agoThe distinction lies in whether the service provider has rendered themselves a "publisher" under 230. The protection has historically been broadly interpreted but, in theory, Facebook could lose the protection if it chose, selectively, what content to promote or remove in violation of its own public TOS. Generally: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306
- pkilgore 5y agoYou have case law for this claim? Or hell, I'll take a quote from your "source" you think supports it. (that's a trick question: No such case exists. What you say is not the law -- for anyone interested in a more-entertaining version summarizing the state of the law in this area than court decisions and statues, check out https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- runako 5y agoFrom a discussion of case history provided by your helpful link: "Generally, courts have said that a service’s ability to control the content that others post on its website is not enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a content developer."
- egberts1 5y agomy Facebook account got closed because they’re demanding my phone number and i won’t supply it.
- GDC7 5y agoFacebook is used by 3B people. When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services. In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule. Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can. It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.
- nullstyle 5y agoIt is, but it's wrong.
- alanlammiman 5y agoIn society not everybody is equal, however in societies with rule of law, the idea is that everybody is at least deemed equal under the law. That this unfortunately often fails in practice is very different from explicitly and intentionally having separate rules
- CreateAccntAgn 5y agoIf these are known misleading public statements then can SEC prosecute them? I'd think these statements can affect the stock price and this is securities fraud.
- elliekelly 5y agoThey would likely raise a "mere puffery" defense. Our legal system recognizes that in the course of business people will inevitably lie. At least a little. And so puffery, as a matter of law, is immaterial. The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud. Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes' defense: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizabeth-holmes-will-use-a-puffery-defense-could-it-work https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...
- hajile 5y agoI'm guessing you have just met "prosecutorial discretion" for the first time. Prosecutors have to power to never bring charges against their friends and allies with basically zero risk. Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor. It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job. Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked. Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence. A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).
- nradov 5y agoThe SEC doesn't conduct criminal prosecutions. They can only bring civil actions for securities law violations. If they do find evidence of criminality they pass it to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- actually_a_dog 5y ago> In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents. [...] > While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism. [...] > In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show. [...] > In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout. This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations, the past several years have shown us the extreme power of misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole. Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on elections by selectively including candidates is a huge disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs to be held accountable. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#Use_as_a_news_source_by_adults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...
- 13years 5y agoIt is exactly what you would expect from such concentration of power and influence. What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.
- msteffen 5y agoIt seems like no one has figured out a good system for moderation on the internet. IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases, and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs. Reddit tried to federate moderation, but it's since become clear that all top subreddits are moderated by the same people. Even HN only works because dang busts ass to keep it good, and that has obvious limits (what happens when dang goes on vacation or retires?)
- maccolgan 5y agoI fear the day when dang retires.
- bambax 5y agoI think part of the problem of "moderation" is exposition, and incentives to maximize user engagement. Posts that nibody sees don't need to be moderated. The problem comes from the fact that platforms offer the most visibility to the worst content, because getting users riled up, excited or upset is the core of their business. It's their only business. Maybe moderation could be solved by regulating the number of likes or reposts a given user can make or a givzn post can receive. Seems a little far-fetched but worth thinking about.
- nradov 5y agoHN only works because YC doesn't sell ads and explicitly treats it as a loss leader to support their investing business.
- asdff 5y agoI wouldn't be surprise if they turn a profit on YC running sentiment analysis. The website seems like it isn't the most expensive to host either.
- vorpalhex 5y agoI don't think universal moderation (a moderation standard across all users) is possible or even desirable. Different users want different things. There are users who never want a single even mildly insulting word. There are users who want unlimited freedom. The best you can do is to break down moderation and let people opt into a level and form of moderation. Tell them upfront what they are getting and let them pick (or let them make their own moderation rules that apply clientside).
- hcrisp 5y ago> At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter. The story-within-the-story here is that there is a FB whistleblower who wanted to bring this to light, not unlike other high-profile cases involving government surveillance. It amazes me that one person can wield more power than scores of seasoned journalists.
- toddmorey 5y agoAm I right to think of it more as a partnership? It does take at least one person with insider knowledge and access. Otherwise, the reporting would lack the backing documents that brings it credibility. And companies seem to be rather opaque to purely outside sources.
- alanlammiman 5y agoUnfortunately it's not just that. A few years ago a friend reached out to a few investigative journalists with documents about wrongdoing at a big co. No response. This was at the time of the Mossack Fonseca hack when many of those same publications were calling out individuals who owned offshore companies, even when it was perfectly legal for them to do so. Maybe she was unlucky, but my anecdotal takeaway was that perhaps it simply required less work, and got more clicks than real investigative journalism.
- KaiserPro 5y agoThis should have been obvious during the election when trump clearly violated the "don't mislead the public about how elections work" when he claimed that postal votes are what ever it is he said it was. That is a clear ban. It says so in the "community guidelines" (side note, you should really read the community guidelines, they are a great set of rules for keeping a community vibrant and happy, assuming they are enforced....) I can see why facebook did it, you don't want to obviously piss off a capricious party with the power to fuck with your bottom line. It doesn't make it any better.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoTrump should have been banned after his Mexican speech, in 2016. Not sure how you can ban a candidate for the Presidency of the US from a US-based service, though.
- varelse 5y agoThis is the culture Tech VC encourages so this is the culture we all get. SSND no?
- nindalf 5y agoHuh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be. I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over. Especially when it’s not a system owned and operated by a handful of people. Here’s an example - as far as I know it’s not possible for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now. There’s no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His inconvenience is an edge case. With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there’s always room for improvement. I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process for adding shields wasn’t policed internally very well in the past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would get a “Shielded-ID-Verified” tag applied to it. ID verification was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams that weren’t related to applying the tag would see the tag and assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more I realised no one really “owned” the tag or policed who could apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular loop hole. In later years the XCheck system started being actively maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into problems like these and made it better.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eigengrau5150 5y agoOn social media, all voices are equal. Some voices are more equal than others. (apologies to Orwell)
- tomp 5y agoAlmost the same as the COVID restrictions. Why? Because the public wants restrictions to feel safe, while the elite wants to be free and independent. Each gets what they want.
- misiti3780 5y ago"In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook." Ouch
- threatofrain 5y agoI’m not sure how we can ever expect FB to treat everyone fairly; there isn’t a system on earth which does so, including any judiciary ever. Imagine that I were treated the same as a president or king.
- tacobelllover99 5y agoThe White House is giving direction on who to silence to FB. They've openly admitted and defended this. If you are still on FB you are a naive
- pueblito 5y ago> At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter. Why the SEC?
- ilikejam 5y agoBecause everything everywhere is securities fraud. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
- hapless 5y agoFacebook are infamous liars, but journalists keep covering Facebook as if their various PR statements are true This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, ever changes Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting the public, journalists are shocked, shocked that FB would do something like this.
- mox1 5y agoIs it really that bad that they apply slightly different sets of rules to accounts with more notoriety? For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers? Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't). I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.
- rosmax_1337 5y agoThe system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.". It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible ofcourse. The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing more or less the same happen in the west about our own controversial issues. [sarcasm not directed at you] But it's ok. In the west companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do business with whoever they want. It is not censorship therefore. [/sarcasm not directed at you]
- bmhin 5y ago> The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.". This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time. And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category. I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent. Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.
- haspoken 5y agohttps://archive.is/3fE10 https://archive.is/3fE10
- riofoxx 5y agoT.o a.s.s.i.s.t y.o.u i.n t.r.a.d.e.s f.o.r b.e.t.t.e.r i.m.p.r.o.v.e.m.e.n.t on c.r.y.p.t.o.c.u.r.r.e.n.c.y W.h.a.t.s.A.p.p (+13052395906)
- wldcordeiro 5y agoThe same is true of its advertisements. 'High-profile' organizations get freedom to literally spam you and the report action is meaningless.
- alanlammiman 5y agoYes. In both directions: 'Low-profile' advertisers (millions of dollars per year is still low-profile) meanwhile get the nonsensical AI rejections and shadowbans
- winternett 5y agoThis is the reality of our new modern world that spans far beyond Facebook. It is the popular, chosen, and paying that succeed on a dramatically increasing level, bolstered online by code and algorithms. This is how ideological and sales monopoly is bolstered and protected with promotion, paywalls, and glass ceilings. It is no wonder why wealth inequality is surging worldwide as it's becoming more impossible to find wealth for everyone but those chosen and those in control... The very minute Facebook and Twitter changed timelines to non-linear formats, and when Reddit began to hide downvotes, the ruse began... I subconsciously doubt that we can really trust analytics properly anymore to be honest, because there now always seems to be a hidden agenda in IT now to suit a specific purpose like profit, messaging, promotion, or subversion. I'm no crusader, but the ideal that anyone can find success on their own merits and hard work is a lie in the digital world especially now, and a lot of the people that look like successful business minds are in reality just wealthy starters that are losing money they started out with while "portraying themselves" as successful and self made... The few platform providers/controllers are the only ones making new money, this is why they have so much disposable cash that they spend on wasteful things like flying penis shaped objects outside of the atmosphere, and on failed ideas like triangular shaped pick up trucks... Talent, wisdom, track-record, and accomplishment are being overlooked for Sensationalism, wealth, and popularity at an all time high in my opinion... This unreasonable and harmful hypocrisy is a critically bad trend that is being promoted, made popular, and deceptively normalized by social media sites as engineered hype. No wonder why it's driving people to do bad things to hop onto the popularity train... :/
- jmwilson 5y agoStrong opsec that the supporting documents are actual photos of a computer screen from the visible moire (or somehow altered to look that way). After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zuckerberg-defends-peter-thiel-in-leaked-facebook-post https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible). Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring everything down to the system call level, and practically every access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ... congratulations, you're caught.
- nickysielicki 5y ago> The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible). Well that, and the fact that his face was immediately to the left of his name.
- killion 5y agoHere is the Apple News link. If you have News+ you can read the article… https://apple.news/A7aEPaMT1SOSmVLGU7J_EOQ https://apple.news/A7aEPaMT1SOSmVLGU7J_EOQ
- egypsy31 5y agoSean Hannity promoted gun sales on his FB. When reported they said it did not violate their rules. When appealed they upheld that original decision. He was given an exemption. Now I get it.
- jmull 5y agoThis was very obvious already (though it's good they did the reporting). We all watched certain high-profile users flouting the rules constantly.
- Jasper_ 5y ago"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until backlashed pushed them out. If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by accident. I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination, achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't know that going in...
- docmars 5y agoNot to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of human communication to police and curate absolutely everything that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by their political partners, and their team of fact checkers complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme partisan players who won the Elite Olympics™ with their nearly infinite wealth and sway.
- shadowgovt 5y agoIt's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."
- roughly 5y agoThat’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears like a profitable business.
- jrochkind1 5y agoSo the more followers someone has, the less scrunity of their content to make sure it follows Facebook's guidelines they get... this seems backwards.
- alanlammiman 5y agoIndeed, and therefore it reveals that enforcing guidelines is not the priority.
- gootler 5y agoToo many bots, that's the problem.
- mannanj 5y agoI got banned yesterday for quoting a nazi official on propaganda: “Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” - Joseph Goebbels Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks. Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in which another organization now decides you are dangerous and censors your presence from the internet independent of what you say.
- bvhg3 5y agoI don't use facebook but HN has censored many of my comments over the years and shadow-banned multiple accounts. Information is dangerous.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoI was banned from Facebook market place for selling a computer with a bad bitcoin joke in the description. Because the computer had an RTX3090 in it (surplus company PC) I wrote something like "Good for making dinosaurs launder money for you if you're into mining". Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful who your target is, as per your quote.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- js2 5y agoFB's AI has no sense of humor. I got banned for 24 hours for this: https://ibb.co/ysFwkCY https://ibb.co/ysFwkCY https://ibb.co/VjLZhPQ https://ibb.co/VjLZhPQ
- otterley 5y agoLet’s be fair here; quoting Goebbels is never a good idea unless you’re writing a history book or a research paper. If you don’t understand why, the problem is you, not Facebook.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe thing about what Facebook is doing is that it may be impossible. And if it's not impossible, it may be a profoundly bad idea. Facebook is trying to build a social network with 100% reach and a userbase beholden to a globally uniform set of rules (where possible; the laws of individual nations will forever intervene). This is not something that has ever succeeded. We don't actually know, apriori, whether you can govern the whole of humanity under one set of norms. It's never been done. It's possible it fundamentally can't be done... That the end result of this experiment is that Facebook fractures and ends up either having to vend multiple views of its userbase with different rules (like Reddit) or has a large chunk of the human populace it can never get on-board. But we should keep in mind what the goal is.
- NullPtrEx 5y agoI mean... we all already knew this
- aaroninsf 5y agoAnother week, another detailed account of the hubristic sociopathic amoral culture that defines this firm. If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them, you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you should find another mechanism to stay in touch. Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war that is currently destroying the west.
- 5faulker 5y agoManaging a large-scale community is not easy. The rules are still evolving and AI have not taken control over the world, so we'll see.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoIt is extremely distressing that a few companies, all located in the same country, and many located in the same state, if not quite the same city, run by a few men with similar politics has the immense power that they do. Some people do not quite understand why. Imagine in they were all Russian and owned by friends of Putin. It should be a matter of national security for other nations to develop regional competitors. It should also be in the inrest of the US to have more internal competition. This is not easy. Making Facebook 3.0 is not the problem, though running at Facebook scale is a challenge. It is how to get users to adopt it. As has been the problem for US upstarts as well. Thankfully a lot of younger people want other social network platforms than Facebook, but it is a bit pointless when the owners of the new networks are the same people who own the old ones. I guess TikTok proves it can be done. It also proved how upset US social media gets when competition knocks on their doors. China, by locking out competition, developed products that are used domestically. There are drawbacks and negative effects of that as well. I dont know how big VK is in Russia. Ideally Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram would be broken into 250 or so different companies spread out among different nations and regions.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoIf you zoom out, it's not especially concerning. The history of media companies suggests all of these companies will become less influential in little time. A few people used to own radio stations. Then it was TV stations. Overlapping them was newspapers/magazines. Things come and go, they tend to concentrate power, but they don't seem to last very long. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are young. There is little indication they'll have much influence in 20 years.
- alanlammiman 5y agoTrue, but lots of harm can be done in 20 years and lots of harm was done by concentrated media in the past (eg all the cases in Manufacturing Consent)
- deltron3030 5y agoThey won't get broken up because western govs want to compete with China and have similar control while still being able to fly under the freedom flag. FB is a virtual China, "soft authoritarianism" basically.
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- xtat 5y agoHearkens oligopoly when only the already powerful can talk. Baby steps.
- balozi 5y agoTechnically, all these users are getting Facebook services for free. Is the complaint here that some people are receiving lesser free services than other people's free services? If that's the case then we need to look at the value of said free services.
- beezischillin 5y agoOutside of the Facebook issue, can you ever really automate solutions for managing society-scale interactions while still being fair to people? If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into corporate budgetary restrictions (you’re not worth it but the celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social and societal consequences of this?
- alanlammiman 5y agodepends on your definition of 'automate'. If you mean by computer software, perhaps not, but it begs the question of why one would presume that automation to be necessary. If you just mean 'software' (not necessarily computer software), then yes, rule of law is software that has scaled to manage society scale interactions and run for hundreds of years. Whether it is 'fair' is still debatable, but it is at least more legitimate than FB's system.
- beezischillin 5y agoI don't believe that you can manually moderate platforms at this scale. Even with the hybrid model of some manual moderation, I've read a lot of articles on the content they're forced to deal with crushing their mental health. Add to that politics intervening threatening regulation unless they're allowed to tilt the scales. I can't even imagine how endlessly complicated that gets. I've been debating this question internally for a while and also the question of algorithms. Subjectively speaking it seems to me that it's just as herculean of a task to come up with an algorithm that provides quality content to just about any user. I've tried some of these "alt-tech" sites/servies that claim to have no feed algos other than popularity and even the ones that have a few quality channels on them have their front pages flooded with all sorts of cooky, weird, bad material. This is not a defense of Facebook (or Twitter), just some thoughts I had for a while now.
- alanlammiman 5y agoWell, legislation + policing + prosecution + courts of law with due process are precisely that - manual moderation of social behaviour at massive scale (admittedly not billions, but hundreds of millions of individuals). Yes, endlessly complicated, yes, costs a fortune, yes, riddled with flaws, yes, it becomes a political problem, yes can be very emotionally challenging (I know because my wife is a criminal public defender. A bad day for me is when a sprint is late. A bad day for her is literal rape, torture, murder, injustice. Definitely puts things in perspective. But she knew what to expect, has a balanced workload, is well compensated and believes it is for a greater good. If facebook is structuring things in a way that people are being crushed - I've read those articles too and don't doubt it - shame on them). But 'it's hard work' isn't a very good excuse. To be clear - I understand your point and sort of agree with it from a software engineering perspective; I just don't think that's necessarily the right perspective here. Every day we demand that governments and companies in all sorts of different industries do lots of hard, complicated, not-easily-computer-programmable, bug-riddled human processes requiring subjective judgement because they need to be done. People & organisations aren't entitled to only do the things that need to be done which they can do with near-zero marginal cost with computer software - when they can do that, good for them. When they can't, tough. Yes, I agree, from personal experience designing good Recommendation Systems is hard. That's a field I'm interested in too - out of curiosity what alt-tech sites have you tried? Would be interested in also trying them and exchanging notes.
- throwaway224466 5y agoIn other words, a feature that makes sure posts from useful idiots with lots of followers on the left are never accidentally censored. I'm sure they also have the opposite version of this tool built to more quickly censor posts from high-profile users on the right.
- mbostleman 5y agoAll animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
- narrator 5y agoI have been better trying to understand how the world will change under China's hegemony. To that end, I have been studying Neo-Confucianism. That being adaptations of Confucianism, the ancient Chinese philosophy of governance, to the 21st century. Facebook's policy seems very neo-Confucian. "Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point of view, people are unequal—as they differ in virtue, intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible to give everyone equal rights without considering their standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal rights or obligations."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing_(Confucian) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing_(Confucian)
- darthvoldemort 5y agoThey should have this a paid-for feature. If people care and want humans to look over their posts, etc, then they can pay $10/month or more. Then it won't be just celebrities it could be anyone. The program could pay for itself.
- KhayriRRWoulfe 5y agoAccounts and pages that have the blue checkmark on Facebook are exempted to all of its rules. The reviewers do not take down blatantly hateful and discriminatory content when these are posted by verified accounts.
- adminscoffee 5y agodating apps have been doing this for years
- grapist420 5y agothis is totally reasonable and arguably necessary for a platform. High profile users are going to be targeted for reporting much more, and the consequences of a false suspension are more visible for them. Think of it like how you might whitelist people who you trust from auto moderation or rate limits on Reddit or some other site if you trust them because the auto mod makes mistakes or you want to give them more options. Obviously FB and Twitters moderation sucks, but that isn’t related to this directly
- neycoda 5y agoThis is true! They make them too much money or they'll cause too much trouble because of their clout if they complain.