24 ms·

Facebook to target harmful coordination by real accounts

164 points by hobbesthompson 5y ago

mwint 5y ago
So they’re going to use this to stop people spreading harmful misinformation, like, say, the conspiracy theory that governments would create vaccine passports, or that a virology lab in Wuhan might have been involved in a virus that came out of Wuhan. Or that masks are a good idea. Dissent from the popular opinion is good and healthy, going both ways.
- shuntress 5y ago
  > Dissent from the popular opinion is good and healthy, going both ways "You gotta hear both sides" is extremely harmful when it is used to equate massively unequal opinions. Of course dissenting opinions should be heard and assessed but it is also obviously absurd to treat some opinion such as "I think that we should vacuum the floors to prepare for guests" with the same weight and validity as "I think we should murder our guests when they arrive that way we wont have to worry about vacuuming"
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    So is this counter-argument. Who decides what's absurd? Two people may have completely different and legitimate views on what's absurd.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    Make whatever strawman analogies you want, but the fact of the matter is that massive online communication platforms like facebook are increasingly censoring dissenting opinions. One day, an opinion that you hold will become "dangerous", and you'll have to choose between conformity or being excluded from our increasingly digital society. edit: why do we keep giving these companies the benefit of the doubt when they continue to lie about everything?
    - shuntress 5y ago
      Don't try to change the subject. My comment is not about facebook, censorship, corporate-run dystopias, or thought-crime exile. Move the goalposts all you want but the fact is that all opinions are not equal in merit. If you do actually want to have a good-faith discussion about how to limit the reach of worse opinions while increasing the reach of better opinions I would be happy to hear your suggestions. Or if you would prefer to discuss how to find agreement on what we consider a "good" or a "bad" opinion, I would start by offering that I think the opinion "face masks do not prevent the spread of airborne respiratory infections" should be considered significantly less reasonable than the opinion "face masks are effective at preventing the spread of airborne respiratory infection".
      - jmaygarden 5y ago
        The post that is now flagged was referring to Dr. Fauci's March 8, 2020 statement that "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask." Dr. Fauci made that statement in a context of trying to ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers at a time when there were runs on toilet paper in stores. I believe you are mischaracterizing the argument that was made. Unfortunately, we may no longer view the original post because your opinion has apparently been deemed more correct.
        mcguire 5y ago
        Ok, apparently this is the hill I'm going to die on. Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly. (Earlier today, I walked past a woman wearing a bandana tied around her head. Below her nose. Why!?) After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution. The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking. "Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited. "Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too. "I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case. "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved." "I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)
  - deleted 5y ago
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sayonaraman 5y ago
This is great, Facebook should add "Two Minutes Hate" feature to the user timeline to address the spread of misinformation by these enemies of the people.
- deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- literallyaduck 5y ago
  We have always been at war with misinformation.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Facebook most certainly has not. You can get paid very handsomely for facilitating misinformation that wouldn't otherwise catch on without a lot of surreptitious advocacy, preferably astroturfed. The cash value of this has everything to do with how well you can get away with it. It's just market dynamics in action. They are simply running into externalities, that's all.
    - ReptileMan 5y ago
      I am not sure you got the joke.
intended 5y ago
From what I can tell, Facebook’s internal research on mitigation is leaning towards studying the connections people have to determine the threat profile - not just the individuals posting habits. Can’t say more, because it’s a guess based on posts and job requirements. So front/standard moderation is outsourced and more advanced threat detection is looking at large coordinated networks. It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs. I’ll also admit, that as poor security through obscurity is, it’s a useful speed bump here. It’s kinda odd to contemplate how this space will evolve.
- cstoner 5y ago
  > It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs. I mean... do _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this sort of thing that would survive being published for the world to see? I don't mean to offend you or anything, I just want to point out that the second you go public with your rules about how these things are detected, the people you are targeting will adjust their behavior to evade them. I think that the secrecy is unfortunately a hard requirement until perhaps we could all coordinate into a global "behavioral score" system. And to be honest, that sort of shit is terrifying, so we should probably never do it.
  - mzs 5y ago
    Sure: Settings > Timeline X chronological X only what your friends share
    - DavidPeiffer 5y ago
      I'm curious how things look for people who are only friends with people of their extreme political persuasion and only likes/follows similarly extreme pages? Does giving some variety of relatively less extreme viewpoints cause a reduction extreme viewpoints?
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        Perhaps it isn't the purview of an infrastructure company (Facebook in this case) to attempt to manipulate society?
btilly 5y ago
Here is one of the challenges with this space. What can be used to suppress misinformation can also be used to suppress information as well. Doing nothing has been weaponized. Doing something will be as well. And we have plenty of examples of things which have been ruled "harmful misinformation" that later turned out not to be. With consequences for those who posted what later turned out to be mainstream. A few examples. There is a reasonable possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Vaccine passports for COVID-19 are likely to become a thing. The conservatorship of Britney Spears is unconstitutional, and has been a vehicle for grand larceny. So how do we suppress harmful misinformation, such as that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud. And not provide tools that can be misappropriated against truths which are inconvenient to people with money and influence?
- makomk 5y ago
  Any attempt to suppress "harmful misinformation" will be seen as partisan because, well, it pretty much is. There was a huge amount of utter bullshit pushed on social media about the 2016 election being stolen by fraud, including stuff that the author obviously could not possibly have worked as described or been used to steal the election, and a large proportion of the US population literally believed Russians had hacked the voting tallies. It obviously wasn't harmless either: someone radicalized by Facebook went and shot a Republican senator, and it was only through masses of luck and intrusive medical interventions that he survived. Yet the only thing the mainstream media showed an iota of concern for was the fact that anyone objected to this. Hell, even in the run-up to the 2020 elections the press were pushing the narrative that it'd be impossible to know the results weren't hacked and the election was valid - right up until it became clear Trump had lost, at which point it became absolutely certain they were valid and the audit chains and processes so robust only a conspiracy nut would question them. The same kinda happened in reverse in 2016.
  - btilly 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that the "senator" you are naming was Congressman Steve Scalise. I have not specifically heard that the shooter, James Hodgkinson, believed in conspiracy theories about a stolen 2016 election. But he may have. However the big difference between partisan beliefs about the two elections is this. After 2016, Democrats mostly believed that they lost at the polls due to an effective disinformation campaign run by the Russians. After 2020, Russians believed that they lost due to widespread vote counting fraud. As https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/partisan-voters-claim-we-wuz-robbed-no-they-werent/ https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/partisan-voters-claim-we... says, Democrats and Republicans believe this by almost exactly the same margins. But what is believed matters. Democrats may have been furious, but they believed in rule of law. Radical Republicans, by contrast, attempted to overturn the election via an insurrection.
anderson1993 5y ago
We know all social media is hit with attempted manipulation, the hard part is figuring out how and why. I doubt Facebook can figure it out.
- daenz 5y ago
  With the current logic that Facebook is using, "manipulation" can mean any behavior that they don't endorse. For example someone is "manipulating" their network by posting anti Biden memes. I recognize that I am extrapolating real group behavior to real individual behavior, but I think that extrapolation is warranted given that we've just made the jump from group bot behaviour to group people behavior.
- yosito 5y ago
  It's a bit hard for them to figure it out when they're one of the main culprits and depend on manipulation for profit.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I find it entirely implausible that facebook, with their vast troves of data and an army of the very best computer scientists money can buy, is incapable of reliably identifying posts and users responsible for mass manipulation on their platform. Unwilling? Sure. Unable? Not a chance.
ggggtez 5y ago
Only about a decade too late.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Facebook never should have started down this road. There's no winning endgame for them here.
- mcguire 5y ago
  What would a winning endgame look like?
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    Depends on how you define 'winning', really. If 'growth at all costs' is your metric, then sure, Facebook is winning. If 'adherence to original vision' is your metric, then you could argue that Facebook went astray a long time ago.
  - ManBlanket 5y ago
    Something like 1984, probably.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Facebook getting to disavow everything they've been paid to do, and accepting payment from a new set of bosses who turned out to have more authority over them than their previous paying customers had. Basically, entering the witness protection program and selling out those they've worked for in the past. Getting a huge cash-out, reputation laundering, and going away to preside over a dwindling number of hapless and heavily surveilled 'users', reporting on their doings to the authorities. That is very much the winning endgame for Facebook. They turned out not to be bigger than governments.
- beezischillin 5y ago
  I doubt they would’ve without political and media pressure.
NoGravitas 5y ago
"Harmful coordination by real accounts" appears to mean mass-reporting and brigading. The truth is, that because Facebook's moderation is so unreliable, with innocent comments frequently leading to bans, while actual death threats and incitement to violence are deemed "not in violation of our community standards", mass-reporting and brigading are among the only recourse real users have to get actual harmful content removed. They're not reliable, of course, and they can be used by all sides, but if Facebook is effective at this, we're looking at a situation where Facebook only does something when Zuckerberg is hauled in front of Congress over something. I'm glad I haven't been on Facebook for many years now, but opting out isn't a solution for everyone.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Is there anything to be said for leaving the harmful content there? If the crapflood made people like facebook less, or get more skeptical, or made the company get serious about not shoveling manipulative garbage down people psyches then I'd be pleased. I know "deplatforming" seems like a good idea, and is effective in the short term, it just strikes me as ultimately the wrong level at which to attack anti-social behaviour on "social networks".
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "If the crapflood made people like facebook less, or get more skeptical, or made the company get serious about not shoveling manipulative garbage down people psyches then I'd be pleased." I believe that experiment has already been run.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    The crapflood just caused people to invade the capital building and refuse to get vaccinated. If anything it made them more engaged and less skeptical.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
plumeria 5y ago
The Google Play Store needs this as well...
ballenf 5y ago
I think we also need transparency around coordination of these efforts with any government actors. At least to the extent the efforts affect citizens. Kind of like transparency reports with regard to data requests.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  Governments have set up departments to forward requests for takedowns directly to Facebook, sidestepping whatever due process they usually would require to get a court order: "Watchdogs say that this coordination between governments and online platforms lacks transparency and operates through an alternative enforcement mechanism that denies due process of law. In the vast majority of cases, the Cyber Unit doesn’t file a court order based on Israeli criminal law and go through the traditional legal process to take down online posts. Instead, the Unit makes appeals to the platform’s content moderation policies and community standards. The enforcement of these policies though can be selective, devoid of different cultural contexts, and flexible to the interests of the powerful." https://prospect.org/world/how-secretive-cyber-unit-censors-palestinians/ https://prospect.org/world/how-secretive-cyber-unit-censors-...
  - pyronik19 5y ago
    This coordination is being attacked in 1a lawsuites as defacto free speech violation due to FB and other big tech acting as agents of the state.
- ManBlanket 5y ago
  Right so those with the privilege of deciding who the good guys are and what constitutes misinformation are current political parties and financial interests. Which is great, because governments have never been responsible for orchestrating their own attacks and campaigns of misinformation. I'm so glad we can trust Facebook to have our best interest at heart.
  - noptd 5y ago
    At least there is some level of accountability and transparency potential for elected officials. I don't see how we would be better off by having a small number of private individuals making these decisions for us.
SteveGerencser 5y ago
I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to get somewhat serious about this. I've worked with clients who have hate brigades that report everything they do and publish in an effort to get their pages and ad accounts shut down. I've gone as far as finding in infiltrating Facebook groups that openly talk about this while planning their next attack. Reported the groups for months and no one at FB cared.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Maybe try adding a letter to who you are contacting, FBI, to see if it would get the response you are hoping.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    If the desired response is "Huh?", sure. The FBI is not going to intervene in Facebook brigading.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Yeah, I read too much into this thinking that it wasn't just mis-information campaigns but the other violent groups posting their vitriol as well.
  - beebmam 5y ago
    The truth is that tech companies don't give a shit about working with law enforcement and actively try to avoid ever dealing with them at all. The ONLY time a tech company works with police is when they are obligated to, by law. It's actually quite a shame, I think it's actively harming our society. Laws without enforcement are worthless.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      The only time a tech company should work with police is when they're required to by law, and not always even then. What are we coming to when we side with police before even knowing what law they're enforcing?
mschuster91 5y ago
Finally. The first ones that seem to be hit were German anti-vaxxers ("Querdenken", per https://www.sueddeutsche.de/service/internet-facebook-loescht-querdenken-kanaele-als-schaedliches-netzwerk-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com-20090101-210916-99-247718 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/service/internet-facebook-loesch...).
boplicity 5y ago
Facebook can't even handle extremely basic moderation and spam fighting. For example, I reported a post today that was a blatant attempt to steal my log-in information. Facebook's response: "it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards." This was for a post that was impersonating Facebook. I've heard very similar stories from many other people. Obviously, Facebook just can't handle even the most basic problems to do with moderation. There are so many problems on their platform that go beyond the most obvious attempts at fraud and scams. Yet, if they can't properly handle the most obvious scams, how can we trust them to properly moderate anything at all?
- agolliver 5y ago
  At 2 am last night a bot impersonating a family member added every one of their friends on facebook & sent them messages. I reported it as a fake account, a ticket which was instantly closed. Facebook sent a notification later to them that the account was not impersonating anyone, no action would be taken, and there was no way to appeal. Interestingly, messenger did splat a bunch of pretty good warnings on top of the DM they sent me: https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  When Facebook talks about "real accounts" they mean only accounts that are not very obviously fake in a way an algorithm can detect. It's unquestionable that it is easy to set up a fake account in FB and it always has been. If they tried harder-- and they almost certainly will have to due to political pressure-- it will still be pretty easy to find more sophisticated ways to fake an account. With an advertising model there are always going to be incentives to fake accounts, and disincentives to FB to close any account. The simple way to stop fake accounts would be to introduce even a small cost to have an account which would make faking accounts not cost effective. But that's not their model.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Are you kidding me? Of course they can but it's complicated. They don't want to lose money. They don't want to be accused of censorship for moderating. If they "moderate" certain people too much they might bring regulation. Etc.
eplanit 5y ago
Glenn Greenwald did a piece on exactly this topic just yesterday: https://rumble.com/vmkc0j-democratic-officials-continue-to-threaten-tech-companies-to-censor-more.html https://rumble.com/vmkc0j-democratic-officials-continue-to-t...
scohesc 5y ago
People should not expect pleasant discourse on social media. You have every single statement, opinion, or reasoning scrutinized by robots or vastly under-paid contractors - none of which understand nuances of conversation like context, sarcasm, etc. Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising.
- boplicity 5y ago
  One of the things about a small community is that there are real social consequences for not staying within the confines of polite behavior. People can get embarrassed, shunned, ignored, etc. Their reputations are harmed, often leading to consequences in terms of work, friends, family, etc. On Facebook, people who are rude & impolite are rewarded with more engagement. Real consequences are very rare. It's a real problem.
- mjr00 5y ago
  > Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising. I feel like this is a big part of why Discord has gotten hugely popular. Communities are isolated and only semi-publicly accessible; most critically, they're not indexed by Google. On most servers, people are using aliases which are not (directly) linked to their real-life identities, but they're still people you get to know and befriend, unlike Reddit-likes where the people commenting are mostly interchangeable. These things make the internet feel a lot closer to how it was in the 90s and early 00s, where you could talk freely with your friends without worrying if someone with a grudge would take what you wrote and turn it into a mob-driven character assassination.
- angelzen 5y ago
  You must never leave your house. If you must leave your house, you must not talk to anyone. If you must talk to someone, you must not talk to anyone else. These are the new rules to keep us safe.
cblconfederate 5y ago
So not ever 'real identity' can save us? Heaven forbid, could it be that the serious facade that facebook sold to advertisers is collapsing?
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210916192204/https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-target-harmful-coordination-by-real-accounts-using-playbook-2021-09-16/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210916192204/https://www.reuter... https://archive.is/lJoWA https://archive.is/lJoWA
yosito 5y ago
On the one hand, I can see how using this to combat organized misinformation could be a good thing. Combating organized vaccine misinformation is the obvious current example. On the other hand, it's a bit dystopian to have a platform used as a public square that cracks down on organizers they don't like.
- pyronik19 5y ago
  I'm old enough to remember when stating covid came out of a wuhan lab was "dangerous misinformation" that could get you removed from social media. Not so much "misinformation" anymore...
drummer 5y ago
Dumpsterfire is flaring up again.
slim 5y ago
Facebook is threatening freedom of association
tomohawk 5y ago
Perhaps they should target harmful coordination by themselves
phkahler 5y ago
>> as it announced a takedown of the German anti-COVID restrictions Querdenken movement. I don't know if that group used any particularly bad tactics, but on the surface that statement sounds like squashing free speech. IDK about germany, but I'm sure FB will do that in the US too. All because "it's our private platform and we are not the government so no first amendment here".
- mc32 5y ago
  Nikki Minaj of all people was suspended by Twitter because she mentioned friends of hers had a bad reaction to a particular vaccine. Like what the eff. People can’t even freely mention an anecdote anymore if it is contrary to the set narrative? What the eff happened to us in the last two years? It’s frankly, disgusting and very concerning.
  - SSilver2k2 5y ago
    Twitter can suspend anyone and anything for any reason. You play on someone else's server you play by their terms. Nothing is stopping Nikki from hosting her own website.
    - throw_m239339 5y ago
      > Twitter can suspend anyone and anything for any reason. You play on someone else's server you play by their terms. Yes, but then, why should there be laws that shield these services from any legal responsibility as to what their users post? The government shouldn't need to protect these businesses either and let them off the hook because of the scale of the moderation. it goes both ways. Private companies can accept whatever they want, the government doesn't have to protect them either, they are a private company after all. They should bear all the risk.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - renewiltord 5y ago
dudus 5y ago
So Facebook will (in addition to policing free speech) police the right of assembly. There's no way this can go wrong.
- void_mint 5y ago
  Websites have always moderated incoming content.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  So, it's true that the Constitution doesn't protect rights from infringement by private businesses, but you're onto something important. The rights of free speech and free assembly are critical to a functioning republic, and their curtailment --- even legally, and by private corporations --- is doing great harm to our tottering system. I don't want government to force businesses to allow speech, but we need to actively oppose private enterprises when they limit speech, and support alternatives that embrace freedom.
iphonexyzy 5y ago
Who cares what the Mafia wants
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
balozi 5y ago
I bet none of Facebook's fans saw it coming; that one one day their social media posts would be part of an official "threat profile"
phendrenad2 5y ago
Facebook is caught between wanting to capture as many users as possible (many of whom have been converted to low-level political trolls thanks to recent political dogmatism), and wanting to create a family-friendly no-criticism zone for Brands to advertise in.
loa_in_ 5y ago
Facebook to develop tools to track coordination across accounts in all matters
m9731526 5y ago
Recently one of my friends got suspended for he commented like "LMAO" in our language. This sort of low quality audits combined with the fact that in Taiwan the auditors are severely biased toward China, make it harmful on its own.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I feel worse for Taiwan now than I’ve ever felt for Hong Kong, because in 1997 I watched that and know the current state was an eventuality. I LOVED the time I spent around Taipei. But considering the state of the US and World, whatever plans China has for Taiwan, seem like they just moved up a decade. After watching what just happened in Afghanistan, and us giving up our basically Chinese border base overnight without telling our allies, no one seriously thinks the Biden Admin will stand up to Chinese action on Taiwan right? I want to go back before you can’t tell the difference between the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese. And you highlight it; China has found a way to lean on the country in a million different ways.
  - gadders 5y ago
    Semi-serious suggestion: Taiwan should put demolition charges around all the TSMC fabs, to be triggered if ever invaded. The threat of what that would do to the global economy should help them get the protection they need.
PikachuEXE 5y ago
Again "Who govern the governors?" But I am not surprised to see another Facebook censorship op.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  I won’t be surprised to see it used selectively, too.
quotemstr 5y ago
Where "harmful" is "having an opinion socially unacceptable in Menlo Park", right? Tech censorship would be hilarious if not so clumsily brazen.
WeekSpeller 5y ago
I did not have facebook account and created one recently. Everyone whom I added was not in US and was not remotely connected to US politics but for some reasons facebook thought I would like "Briertbart" and some anti vaxx related pages and posts. Keep in mind that I have no messages sent and other info and use facebook inside a mozilla container, one top of that I am not even anti vaxxer. But still they promoted all those things to me.
theHIDninja 5y ago
The Facebook problem will only be solved with violence. The Twitter problem will only be solved with violence. The Google problem will only be solved with violence.
erhk 5y ago
What is harmful
narrator 5y ago
Facebook is too successful. They are so successful that they are mainly focused on implementing features to remove users, rather than to add them. Also, the 2016 election broke big tech a little, but covid turned big tech into China, at least when it comes to that issue. It's as if anti-covid lockdown activism was the west's June 6th tinnamen square remembrance movement. It also broke google in much the same way. I have to use Yandex or at least duckduckgo when searching for information about any controversial topic now. To even hear what the anti-lockdown crowd has to say I have to go to obscure telegram channels. Facebook isn't the worst offender even. I recently tried to have a political discussion on nextdoor and me and a couple of other people just gave up because all our comments kept getting deleted. This is what I call "The lost doggy and kitty internet". On "The lost doggy and kitty Internet" only the most light topics can be discussed. Only yoga classes and lost kitty notices are allowed. On the lost doggy and kitty internet there is a polite dinner party taking place, with a slaughterbot drone hovering overhead, buzzing around between partygoers listening everywhere intently for wrong think with a hair trigger fire button ready to go if any section of the crowd starts hurting people's brains...
m0llusk 5y ago
Facebook to respond to toxic behavior with more toxic behavior. This is certain to end well.
Fjolsvith 5y ago
I am wondering if FB CEO is the "Tech Executive-1" referred to in the Michael Sussmann indictment: https://www.scribd.com/document/525726563/Sussmann-Indictment https://www.scribd.com/document/525726563/Sussmann-Indictmen...

So they’re going to use this to stop people spreading harmful misinformation, like, say, the conspiracy theory that governments would create vaccine passports, or that a virology lab in Wuhan might have been involved in a virus that came out of Wuhan. Or that masks are a good idea. Dissent from the popular opinion is good and healthy, going both ways.

shuntress 5y ago
> Dissent from the popular opinion is good and healthy, going both ways "You gotta hear both sides" is extremely harmful when it is used to equate massively unequal opinions. Of course dissenting opinions should be heard and assessed but it is also obviously absurd to treat some opinion such as "I think that we should vacuum the floors to prepare for guests" with the same weight and validity as "I think we should murder our guests when they arrive that way we wont have to worry about vacuuming"
- silicon2401 5y ago
  So is this counter-argument. Who decides what's absurd? Two people may have completely different and legitimate views on what's absurd.
- colpabar 5y ago
  Make whatever strawman analogies you want, but the fact of the matter is that massive online communication platforms like facebook are increasingly censoring dissenting opinions. One day, an opinion that you hold will become "dangerous", and you'll have to choose between conformity or being excluded from our increasingly digital society. edit: why do we keep giving these companies the benefit of the doubt when they continue to lie about everything?
  - shuntress 5y ago
    Don't try to change the subject. My comment is not about facebook, censorship, corporate-run dystopias, or thought-crime exile. Move the goalposts all you want but the fact is that all opinions are not equal in merit. If you do actually want to have a good-faith discussion about how to limit the reach of worse opinions while increasing the reach of better opinions I would be happy to hear your suggestions. Or if you would prefer to discuss how to find agreement on what we consider a "good" or a "bad" opinion, I would start by offering that I think the opinion "face masks do not prevent the spread of airborne respiratory infections" should be considered significantly less reasonable than the opinion "face masks are effective at preventing the spread of airborne respiratory infection".
    - jmaygarden 5y ago
      The post that is now flagged was referring to Dr. Fauci's March 8, 2020 statement that "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask." Dr. Fauci made that statement in a context of trying to ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers at a time when there were runs on toilet paper in stores. I believe you are mischaracterizing the argument that was made. Unfortunately, we may no longer view the original post because your opinion has apparently been deemed more correct.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        Ok, apparently this is the hill I'm going to die on. Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly. (Earlier today, I walked past a woman wearing a bandana tied around her head. Below her nose. Why!?) After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution. The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking. "Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited. "Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too. "I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case. "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved." "I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

sayonaraman 5y ago

This is great, Facebook should add "Two Minutes Hate" feature to the user timeline to address the spread of misinformation by these enemies of the people.

deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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literallyaduck 5y ago
We have always been at war with misinformation.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Facebook most certainly has not. You can get paid very handsomely for facilitating misinformation that wouldn't otherwise catch on without a lot of surreptitious advocacy, preferably astroturfed. The cash value of this has everything to do with how well you can get away with it. It's just market dynamics in action. They are simply running into externalities, that's all.
  - ReptileMan 5y ago
    I am not sure you got the joke.

intended 5y ago

From what I can tell, Facebook’s internal research on mitigation is leaning towards studying the connections people have to determine the threat profile - not just the individuals posting habits. Can’t say more, because it’s a guess based on posts and job requirements. So front/standard moderation is outsourced and more advanced threat detection is looking at large coordinated networks. It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs. I’ll also admit, that as poor security through obscurity is, it’s a useful speed bump here. It’s kinda odd to contemplate how this space will evolve.

cstoner 5y ago
> It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs. I mean... do _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this sort of thing that would survive being published for the world to see? I don't mean to offend you or anything, I just want to point out that the second you go public with your rules about how these things are detected, the people you are targeting will adjust their behavior to evade them. I think that the secrecy is unfortunately a hard requirement until perhaps we could all coordinate into a global "behavioral score" system. And to be honest, that sort of shit is terrifying, so we should probably never do it.
- mzs 5y ago
  Sure: Settings > Timeline X chronological X only what your friends share
  - DavidPeiffer 5y ago
    I'm curious how things look for people who are only friends with people of their extreme political persuasion and only likes/follows similarly extreme pages? Does giving some variety of relatively less extreme viewpoints cause a reduction extreme viewpoints?
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      Perhaps it isn't the purview of an infrastructure company (Facebook in this case) to attempt to manipulate society?

btilly 5y ago

Here is one of the challenges with this space. What can be used to suppress misinformation can also be used to suppress information as well. Doing nothing has been weaponized. Doing something will be as well. And we have plenty of examples of things which have been ruled "harmful misinformation" that later turned out not to be. With consequences for those who posted what later turned out to be mainstream. A few examples. There is a reasonable possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Vaccine passports for COVID-19 are likely to become a thing. The conservatorship of Britney Spears is unconstitutional, and has been a vehicle for grand larceny. So how do we suppress harmful misinformation, such as that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud. And not provide tools that can be misappropriated against truths which are inconvenient to people with money and influence?

makomk 5y ago
Any attempt to suppress "harmful misinformation" will be seen as partisan because, well, it pretty much is. There was a huge amount of utter bullshit pushed on social media about the 2016 election being stolen by fraud, including stuff that the author obviously could not possibly have worked as described or been used to steal the election, and a large proportion of the US population literally believed Russians had hacked the voting tallies. It obviously wasn't harmless either: someone radicalized by Facebook went and shot a Republican senator, and it was only through masses of luck and intrusive medical interventions that he survived. Yet the only thing the mainstream media showed an iota of concern for was the fact that anyone objected to this. Hell, even in the run-up to the 2020 elections the press were pushing the narrative that it'd be impossible to know the results weren't hacked and the election was valid - right up until it became clear Trump had lost, at which point it became absolutely certain they were valid and the audit chains and processes so robust only a conspiracy nut would question them. The same kinda happened in reverse in 2016.
- btilly 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the "senator" you are naming was Congressman Steve Scalise. I have not specifically heard that the shooter, James Hodgkinson, believed in conspiracy theories about a stolen 2016 election. But he may have. However the big difference between partisan beliefs about the two elections is this. After 2016, Democrats mostly believed that they lost at the polls due to an effective disinformation campaign run by the Russians. After 2020, Russians believed that they lost due to widespread vote counting fraud. As https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/partisan-voters-claim-we-wuz-robbed-no-they-werent/ https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/partisan-voters-claim-we... says, Democrats and Republicans believe this by almost exactly the same margins. But what is believed matters. Democrats may have been furious, but they believed in rule of law. Radical Republicans, by contrast, attempted to overturn the election via an insurrection.

anderson1993 5y ago

We know all social media is hit with attempted manipulation, the hard part is figuring out how and why. I doubt Facebook can figure it out.

daenz 5y ago
With the current logic that Facebook is using, "manipulation" can mean any behavior that they don't endorse. For example someone is "manipulating" their network by posting anti Biden memes. I recognize that I am extrapolating real group behavior to real individual behavior, but I think that extrapolation is warranted given that we've just made the jump from group bot behaviour to group people behavior.
yosito 5y ago
It's a bit hard for them to figure it out when they're one of the main culprits and depend on manipulation for profit.
elliekelly 5y ago
I find it entirely implausible that facebook, with their vast troves of data and an army of the very best computer scientists money can buy, is incapable of reliably identifying posts and users responsible for mass manipulation on their platform. Unwilling? Sure. Unable? Not a chance.

ggggtez 5y ago

Only about a decade too late.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago

Facebook never should have started down this road. There's no winning endgame for them here.

mcguire 5y ago
What would a winning endgame look like?
- 10000truths 5y ago
  Depends on how you define 'winning', really. If 'growth at all costs' is your metric, then sure, Facebook is winning. If 'adherence to original vision' is your metric, then you could argue that Facebook went astray a long time ago.
- ManBlanket 5y ago
  Something like 1984, probably.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Facebook getting to disavow everything they've been paid to do, and accepting payment from a new set of bosses who turned out to have more authority over them than their previous paying customers had. Basically, entering the witness protection program and selling out those they've worked for in the past. Getting a huge cash-out, reputation laundering, and going away to preside over a dwindling number of hapless and heavily surveilled 'users', reporting on their doings to the authorities. That is very much the winning endgame for Facebook. They turned out not to be bigger than governments.
beezischillin 5y ago
I doubt they would’ve without political and media pressure.

NoGravitas 5y ago

"Harmful coordination by real accounts" appears to mean mass-reporting and brigading. The truth is, that because Facebook's moderation is so unreliable, with innocent comments frequently leading to bans, while actual death threats and incitement to violence are deemed "not in violation of our community standards", mass-reporting and brigading are among the only recourse real users have to get actual harmful content removed. They're not reliable, of course, and they can be used by all sides, but if Facebook is effective at this, we're looking at a situation where Facebook only does something when Zuckerberg is hauled in front of Congress over something. I'm glad I haven't been on Facebook for many years now, but opting out isn't a solution for everyone.

Y_Y 5y ago
Is there anything to be said for leaving the harmful content there? If the crapflood made people like facebook less, or get more skeptical, or made the company get serious about not shoveling manipulative garbage down people psyches then I'd be pleased. I know "deplatforming" seems like a good idea, and is effective in the short term, it just strikes me as ultimately the wrong level at which to attack anti-social behaviour on "social networks".
- mcguire 5y ago
  "If the crapflood made people like facebook less, or get more skeptical, or made the company get serious about not shoveling manipulative garbage down people psyches then I'd be pleased." I believe that experiment has already been run.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  The crapflood just caused people to invade the capital building and refuse to get vaccinated. If anything it made them more engaged and less skeptical.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

plumeria 5y ago

The Google Play Store needs this as well...

ballenf 5y ago

I think we also need transparency around coordination of these efforts with any government actors. At least to the extent the efforts affect citizens. Kind of like transparency reports with regard to data requests.

roywiggins 5y ago
Governments have set up departments to forward requests for takedowns directly to Facebook, sidestepping whatever due process they usually would require to get a court order: "Watchdogs say that this coordination between governments and online platforms lacks transparency and operates through an alternative enforcement mechanism that denies due process of law. In the vast majority of cases, the Cyber Unit doesn’t file a court order based on Israeli criminal law and go through the traditional legal process to take down online posts. Instead, the Unit makes appeals to the platform’s content moderation policies and community standards. The enforcement of these policies though can be selective, devoid of different cultural contexts, and flexible to the interests of the powerful." https://prospect.org/world/how-secretive-cyber-unit-censors-palestinians/ https://prospect.org/world/how-secretive-cyber-unit-censors-...
- pyronik19 5y ago
  This coordination is being attacked in 1a lawsuites as defacto free speech violation due to FB and other big tech acting as agents of the state.
ManBlanket 5y ago
Right so those with the privilege of deciding who the good guys are and what constitutes misinformation are current political parties and financial interests. Which is great, because governments have never been responsible for orchestrating their own attacks and campaigns of misinformation. I'm so glad we can trust Facebook to have our best interest at heart.
- noptd 5y ago
  At least there is some level of accountability and transparency potential for elected officials. I don't see how we would be better off by having a small number of private individuals making these decisions for us.

SteveGerencser 5y ago

I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to get somewhat serious about this. I've worked with clients who have hate brigades that report everything they do and publish in an effort to get their pages and ad accounts shut down. I've gone as far as finding in infiltrating Facebook groups that openly talk about this while planning their next attack. Reported the groups for months and no one at FB cared.

dylan604 5y ago
Maybe try adding a letter to who you are contacting, FBI, to see if it would get the response you are hoping.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  If the desired response is "Huh?", sure. The FBI is not going to intervene in Facebook brigading.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Yeah, I read too much into this thinking that it wasn't just mis-information campaigns but the other violent groups posting their vitriol as well.
- beebmam 5y ago
  The truth is that tech companies don't give a shit about working with law enforcement and actively try to avoid ever dealing with them at all. The ONLY time a tech company works with police is when they are obligated to, by law. It's actually quite a shame, I think it's actively harming our society. Laws without enforcement are worthless.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    The only time a tech company should work with police is when they're required to by law, and not always even then. What are we coming to when we side with police before even knowing what law they're enforcing?

mschuster91 5y ago

Finally. The first ones that seem to be hit were German anti-vaxxers ("Querdenken", per https://www.sueddeutsche.de/service/internet-facebook-loescht-querdenken-kanaele-als-schaedliches-netzwerk-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com-20090101-210916-99-247718 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/service/internet-facebook-loesch...).

boplicity 5y ago

Facebook can't even handle extremely basic moderation and spam fighting. For example, I reported a post today that was a blatant attempt to steal my log-in information. Facebook's response: "it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards." This was for a post that was impersonating Facebook. I've heard very similar stories from many other people. Obviously, Facebook just can't handle even the most basic problems to do with moderation. There are so many problems on their platform that go beyond the most obvious attempts at fraud and scams. Yet, if they can't properly handle the most obvious scams, how can we trust them to properly moderate anything at all?

agolliver 5y ago
At 2 am last night a bot impersonating a family member added every one of their friends on facebook & sent them messages. I reported it as a fake account, a ticket which was instantly closed. Facebook sent a notification later to them that the account was not impersonating anyone, no action would be taken, and there was no way to appeal. Interestingly, messenger did splat a bunch of pretty good warnings on top of the DM they sent me: https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png
georgeecollins 5y ago
When Facebook talks about "real accounts" they mean only accounts that are not very obviously fake in a way an algorithm can detect. It's unquestionable that it is easy to set up a fake account in FB and it always has been. If they tried harder-- and they almost certainly will have to due to political pressure-- it will still be pretty easy to find more sophisticated ways to fake an account. With an advertising model there are always going to be incentives to fake accounts, and disincentives to FB to close any account. The simple way to stop fake accounts would be to introduce even a small cost to have an account which would make faking accounts not cost effective. But that's not their model.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Are you kidding me? Of course they can but it's complicated. They don't want to lose money. They don't want to be accused of censorship for moderating. If they "moderate" certain people too much they might bring regulation. Etc.

eplanit 5y ago

Glenn Greenwald did a piece on exactly this topic just yesterday: https://rumble.com/vmkc0j-democratic-officials-continue-to-threaten-tech-companies-to-censor-more.html https://rumble.com/vmkc0j-democratic-officials-continue-to-t...

scohesc 5y ago

People should not expect pleasant discourse on social media. You have every single statement, opinion, or reasoning scrutinized by robots or vastly under-paid contractors - none of which understand nuances of conversation like context, sarcasm, etc. Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising.

boplicity 5y ago
One of the things about a small community is that there are real social consequences for not staying within the confines of polite behavior. People can get embarrassed, shunned, ignored, etc. Their reputations are harmed, often leading to consequences in terms of work, friends, family, etc. On Facebook, people who are rude & impolite are rewarded with more engagement. Real consequences are very rare. It's a real problem.
mjr00 5y ago
> Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising. I feel like this is a big part of why Discord has gotten hugely popular. Communities are isolated and only semi-publicly accessible; most critically, they're not indexed by Google. On most servers, people are using aliases which are not (directly) linked to their real-life identities, but they're still people you get to know and befriend, unlike Reddit-likes where the people commenting are mostly interchangeable. These things make the internet feel a lot closer to how it was in the 90s and early 00s, where you could talk freely with your friends without worrying if someone with a grudge would take what you wrote and turn it into a mob-driven character assassination.
angelzen 5y ago
You must never leave your house. If you must leave your house, you must not talk to anyone. If you must talk to someone, you must not talk to anyone else. These are the new rules to keep us safe.

cblconfederate 5y ago

So not ever 'real identity' can save us? Heaven forbid, could it be that the serious facade that facebook sold to advertisers is collapsing?

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210916192204/https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-target-harmful-coordination-by-real-accounts-using-playbook-2021-09-16/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210916192204/https://www.reuter... https://archive.is/lJoWA https://archive.is/lJoWA

yosito 5y ago

On the one hand, I can see how using this to combat organized misinformation could be a good thing. Combating organized vaccine misinformation is the obvious current example. On the other hand, it's a bit dystopian to have a platform used as a public square that cracks down on organizers they don't like.

pyronik19 5y ago
I'm old enough to remember when stating covid came out of a wuhan lab was "dangerous misinformation" that could get you removed from social media. Not so much "misinformation" anymore...

drummer 5y ago

Dumpsterfire is flaring up again.

slim 5y ago

Facebook is threatening freedom of association

tomohawk 5y ago

Perhaps they should target harmful coordination by themselves

phkahler 5y ago

>> as it announced a takedown of the German anti-COVID restrictions Querdenken movement. I don't know if that group used any particularly bad tactics, but on the surface that statement sounds like squashing free speech. IDK about germany, but I'm sure FB will do that in the US too. All because "it's our private platform and we are not the government so no first amendment here".

mc32 5y ago
Nikki Minaj of all people was suspended by Twitter because she mentioned friends of hers had a bad reaction to a particular vaccine. Like what the eff. People can’t even freely mention an anecdote anymore if it is contrary to the set narrative? What the eff happened to us in the last two years? It’s frankly, disgusting and very concerning.
- SSilver2k2 5y ago
  Twitter can suspend anyone and anything for any reason. You play on someone else's server you play by their terms. Nothing is stopping Nikki from hosting her own website.
  - throw_m239339 5y ago
    > Twitter can suspend anyone and anything for any reason. You play on someone else's server you play by their terms. Yes, but then, why should there be laws that shield these services from any legal responsibility as to what their users post? The government shouldn't need to protect these businesses either and let them off the hook because of the scale of the moderation. it goes both ways. Private companies can accept whatever they want, the government doesn't have to protect them either, they are a private company after all. They should bear all the risk.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - renewiltord 5y ago

dudus 5y ago

So Facebook will (in addition to policing free speech) police the right of assembly. There's no way this can go wrong.

void_mint 5y ago
Websites have always moderated incoming content.
JasonFruit 5y ago
So, it's true that the Constitution doesn't protect rights from infringement by private businesses, but you're onto something important. The rights of free speech and free assembly are critical to a functioning republic, and their curtailment --- even legally, and by private corporations --- is doing great harm to our tottering system. I don't want government to force businesses to allow speech, but we need to actively oppose private enterprises when they limit speech, and support alternatives that embrace freedom.

iphonexyzy 5y ago

Who cares what the Mafia wants

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

balozi 5y ago

I bet none of Facebook's fans saw it coming; that one one day their social media posts would be part of an official "threat profile"

phendrenad2 5y ago

Facebook is caught between wanting to capture as many users as possible (many of whom have been converted to low-level political trolls thanks to recent political dogmatism), and wanting to create a family-friendly no-criticism zone for Brands to advertise in.

loa_in_ 5y ago

Facebook to develop tools to track coordination across accounts in all matters

m9731526 5y ago

Recently one of my friends got suspended for he commented like "LMAO" in our language. This sort of low quality audits combined with the fact that in Taiwan the auditors are severely biased toward China, make it harmful on its own.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I feel worse for Taiwan now than I’ve ever felt for Hong Kong, because in 1997 I watched that and know the current state was an eventuality. I LOVED the time I spent around Taipei. But considering the state of the US and World, whatever plans China has for Taiwan, seem like they just moved up a decade. After watching what just happened in Afghanistan, and us giving up our basically Chinese border base overnight without telling our allies, no one seriously thinks the Biden Admin will stand up to Chinese action on Taiwan right? I want to go back before you can’t tell the difference between the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese. And you highlight it; China has found a way to lean on the country in a million different ways.
- gadders 5y ago
  Semi-serious suggestion: Taiwan should put demolition charges around all the TSMC fabs, to be triggered if ever invaded. The threat of what that would do to the global economy should help them get the protection they need.

PikachuEXE 5y ago

Again "Who govern the governors?" But I am not surprised to see another Facebook censorship op.

commandlinefan 5y ago
I won’t be surprised to see it used selectively, too.

quotemstr 5y ago

Where "harmful" is "having an opinion socially unacceptable in Menlo Park", right? Tech censorship would be hilarious if not so clumsily brazen.

WeekSpeller 5y ago

I did not have facebook account and created one recently. Everyone whom I added was not in US and was not remotely connected to US politics but for some reasons facebook thought I would like "Briertbart" and some anti vaxx related pages and posts. Keep in mind that I have no messages sent and other info and use facebook inside a mozilla container, one top of that I am not even anti vaxxer. But still they promoted all those things to me.

theHIDninja 5y ago

The Facebook problem will only be solved with violence. The Twitter problem will only be solved with violence. The Google problem will only be solved with violence.

erhk 5y ago

What is harmful

narrator 5y ago

Facebook is too successful. They are so successful that they are mainly focused on implementing features to remove users, rather than to add them. Also, the 2016 election broke big tech a little, but covid turned big tech into China, at least when it comes to that issue. It's as if anti-covid lockdown activism was the west's June 6th tinnamen square remembrance movement. It also broke google in much the same way. I have to use Yandex or at least duckduckgo when searching for information about any controversial topic now. To even hear what the anti-lockdown crowd has to say I have to go to obscure telegram channels. Facebook isn't the worst offender even. I recently tried to have a political discussion on nextdoor and me and a couple of other people just gave up because all our comments kept getting deleted. This is what I call "The lost doggy and kitty internet". On "The lost doggy and kitty Internet" only the most light topics can be discussed. Only yoga classes and lost kitty notices are allowed. On the lost doggy and kitty internet there is a polite dinner party taking place, with a slaughterbot drone hovering overhead, buzzing around between partygoers listening everywhere intently for wrong think with a hair trigger fire button ready to go if any section of the crowd starts hurting people's brains...

m0llusk 5y ago

Facebook to respond to toxic behavior with more toxic behavior. This is certain to end well.

Fjolsvith 5y ago

I am wondering if FB CEO is the "Tech Executive-1" referred to in the Michael Sussmann indictment: https://www.scribd.com/document/525726563/Sussmann-Indictment https://www.scribd.com/document/525726563/Sussmann-Indictmen...