9 ms·

I think people that work on this feature mean well - or at least they think that they mean well. But as a result, we have a two-tier system where the peasants h

• q1w2 5y ago
  You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work. Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team. If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity. Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?
  • otterley 5y ago
    Nobody is complaining that Facebook has exceptions for automatically suspending accounts just because people are misreporting them as abusive. The issue is, and has always been, exceptions to the content-based rules which are supposed to apply equally to everyone.
    • nindalf 5y ago
      So if hundreds of people reported the content posted by a celebrity, or if a classifier misfired on the content posted by a celebrity, there shouldn’t be any protection for the content?
      • otterley 5y ago
        The content should be evaluated according to the same set of the rules that apply to everyone else. If the content classification rules are properly implemented, no amount of button-smashing should result in a different outcome.
        • lavabiopsy 5y ago
          If you know how to build a bug-free system with content classification rules that are properly implemented for 2 billion people in every conceivable circumstance, I think Facebook (or any other big social media company) would pay you a lot of money to implement that. Like, an unbelievably large sum of money.
          • lmm 5y ago
            That's beside the point. If your classification system isn't good enough to use on celebrities, it's not good enough to use on regular people either - bans are just as annoying for them, even if they have less voice to complain.
            • lavabiopsy 5y ago
              I'm not sure what the point here is other than that bans are annoying? Also, I don't think it was suggested to use a classification system with no bans?
              • lmm 5y ago
                People aren't objecting to the fact that the rules misclassify people sometimes. They're objecting to the two-tier system that lets celebrities avoid bans but doesn't let regular users do so.
                • lavabiopsy 5y ago
                  I think you may have missed something in the post chain? Those are both the same thing in this context.
  • danudey 5y ago
    This is exactly the solution. IF tons of people are reporting Steve Newscaster because he posted a status about how his team won, then he shouldn't become immune to criticism, those people should lose the privilege of having their voice heard. Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if they keep doing it, make it permanent.
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      That might not work. In the eternal September of Facebook there may always be enough new accounts to continuously file false reports against high profile accounts.
      • greenyoda 5y ago
        HN has addressed this problem by not granting new users flagging privileges - you need a certain karma threshold to flag an article or comment. And flagging/vouching privileges can be removed for HN users who abuse them.
        • anigbrowl 5y ago
          Yeah but you can just buy warmed-up verified accounts on SEO marketplaces, often several years old and patiently curated to be blandly inoffensive and ready to be turned into whatever you need.
          • greenyoda 5y ago
            Still, having to do that greatly reduces the problem. The average person who wants to censor a politician they hate isn't going to spend money to buy an account. Another potential mitigation might be to put a limit on the number of posts that a single user can flag in a day. At some point, the cost of large-scale content manipulation could be made to exceed the expected gains. It may even be profitable for Facebook to crack down on this. Every celebrity post that gets illegitimately taken down has potential for showing ads to millions of people.
  • cratermoon 5y ago
    > high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring this "mass downvote" is the essence of the structural elitism?
    • vasco 5y ago
      Popular users get lots of eyeballs on their content. If an average post will get 1 report per 10k views, a popular post with 10m views will get 1000 reports. It doesn't have to have a deeper meaning.
      • paulmd 5y ago
        well, in that case, why not make the metric reports-per-view? if you make the metric a rate then it doesn't matter whether it gets 10k views or 10m views, the question becomes "what % of viewers thought this was worth a report". The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.
        • reissbaker 5y ago
          Because brigading exists.
          • smsm42 5y ago
            Brigading is likely a detectable pattern with enough data. Sure, it'd be hard to distinguish between residents of some chan brigading their enemy and somebody being a target of public shaming due to cancel campaign, but in my eyes it's a feature.
      • smsm42 5y ago
        FB knows how many eyeballs there was. Their whole business is counting eyeballs. So they can easily teach whatever robot they use to take eyeball counts into account, and give more weight to "report per view" than to "absolute number of reports".
  • YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
    In addition, maybe a better system would also increase the effort needed to file a report. Calling in and leaving a voicemail message in response to specific questions, for example.
  • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    > You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply do not work. You would think with the literal legion of geniuses Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling reports than simply counting them and taking down content that receives over X reports.
    • camdat 5y ago
      They do. In the linked article it discusses high-risk accounts requiring less reports to take down a post, down to as little as one.
      • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
        I was being sarcastic.
  • Talanes 5y ago
    >Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies? This might work if the response to a report wasn't so arbitrary. I've been given bans for using heated language, yet had comments that were just as heated AND making direct threats at people marked as not violating any rules when I made the report.
• nindalf 5y ago
  Let me try to explain it again. Suppose an integrity system has a true positive rate of 99.99%. That would be good enough to deploy right? Except that when applied to millions of accounts, 0.01% is still a massive number of people. This is even worse when those people are unusual in some way. For example they might open conversations with hundreds of strangers a day for good reasons. But their behaviour is so similar to those of abusive accounts that they get penalised. You might say that maybe 99.99% isn’t good enough and the engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share. Your concerns about different treatment for some people is valid. But again, their experience is different. For example, if an account or content is reported by hundreds of people it’ll be taken down. After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right? Except celebrities often are at the receiving end of such campaigns. There needs to be exceptions so such rules aren’t exploited in such a manner.
  • YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
    >"After all, there's no reason for accounts in good standing to lie, right?" No reason is different from no good reason. Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida (~300,000 people). Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts, the edge cases can be caught and/or anticipated, creative solutions can be applied, etc. If history teaches us anything, it's that all public facing systems will be exploited. Those who design them should anticipate this. (Thanks, by the way, for posting about your perspective. It looks very different to those of us on the outside.)
    • nindalf 5y ago
      > Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts And I worked for 4 years on one such small part (internally called UFAC), trying to help potential false positives of such a system. As for classifier with a true positive rate of 99.99999%, I don't know much but I don't think it's possible. But if there's someone out there who might know, then they should say so.
• jensensbutton 5y ago
  Meh, we already live in a world with one set of rules for the peasants and another for the nobility. Seems like just another area where Facebook reflects the real world.
  • smsm42 5y ago
    In most systems, it is considered a bug to be fixed, not a feature to be proud of, like Facebook people are.
• winternett 5y ago
  I agree with the perspective of peasants and nobility being at play... Remember back in the day when a friend got a new game console and invited you over to check it out with the ideal that you'd get to try it but they only had one controller? Really all they wanted to do was have you come and watch them play, and you sat there until you got bored of never having a chance to engage with it? That is the modern social media experience. They play with your ability to be visible even to people that follow you for updates on your posts. The only way for non-elites (people deemed worthy of ranking) is to pay for ads, which appear as lower quality "promoted" content. The model of social media started with everyone on the same playing field, but there are so many dimensions that can be manipulated to keep users thinking that it is functional while these sites change to serving the purpose of generating revenue for partners and paying interests underneath a façade of being fair communities. If you speak out against them, they censor you as well, all behind the scenes. It's simply better to go back to creating independent sites, and then to hope you get ranked fairly on Google, and that people bookmark you... We become powerless when we allow corporate control of our communication, because governments are not aware nor vigilant of/to the impacts to regulate social sites until it's far too late, and because profit is king in that world over simply doing what is fair and positive. The business model feeds misinformation, chaos, disharmony, and conflict, just like reality TV does now, Why? Because it keeps people glued to their screens. Even these platforms are terrified of instituting positive changes out of fear of losing their market share and user base... Overnight Twitter, FaceBook, IG, or any of these sites can lose their user base and reach just like Club House and Vine... That has to be said as well. A big problem is that many accounts that post sensationalized (violent, graphic, sexual) content are really run by people that are building follower accounts to sell later on, as a symptom of heavily limited organic account growth (the ability to get followers) on these platforms... People build accounts by posting wild content and then sell them on the black market to others who start out looking like popular individuals because the accounts come with followers already included. Being successful on social media is no longer about having quality content, it's about how much you pay and how professional your image is... No wonder why class-ism has taken hold on it all. There are still plenty of ways of maintaining fairness on any of these communities/platforms, and company leadership needs to go back and review the original promises they made to everyone in order to build their current user base (promises that they've all now totally broken) and fix those issues as the primary basis for resetting their flaws and oversight.