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Human trafficking is rife on Facebook. It doesn't take very long to find some really disgusting stuff. There are some NGOs like IJM who have teams of analysts

Human trafficking is rife on Facebook. It doesn't take very long to find some really disgusting stuff. There are some NGOs like IJM who have teams of analysts that scout for trafficking victims on Facebook all day. It's largely a manual process that requires infiltrating public groups and connecting with suspicious profiles. Oftentimes, it's just strange dogwhistles to look out for like profiles of young women that say "Frycook at the Krusty Krab." I helped build an app for an anti-human trafficking hackathon (we dubbed it "The Creeper Crawler") that scraped abusive profiles. I think ML could be a powerful tool for flagging these profiles, but this is a larger moderation problem I see no easy solution to.

hef19898 5y ago
Everytime I think FB cannot be any worse, something like this comes up...
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Human trafficking is rife on Facebook Even looking at HN’s reaction, which has a strong component rationalising for Facebook, it’s unsurprising that Facebook is itself divided on its responsibility to moderate. Even when we get to literal slavery. A risk from this is contagion. The fish rots from the head down. But it’s been rotting for some time. Those people will, after Facebook, move on to other roles of influence.
- blunte 5y ago
  What amazes me is that we know HN is full of FB employees/devs. How can someone work for a company that has such a history of doing or allowing dirty deeds, often suppressing the evidence. Starting from the very top of Facebook, it is a completely amoral company. Google, on the other hand, is just moreso just naive and seems to believe it can solve problems with AI, without human judgment or oversight.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    You could say the same for most companies though - Microsoft's dodgy QDOS and Mosaic deals, Amazon's warehouses and temp hiring practices.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > could say the same for most companies No, you couldn’t, because while those things aren’t great, they aren’t literal slavery being advertised while the person they’re paying the ad money to looks the other way.
      - sgregnt 5y ago
        I'd be honored to work for facebook. Most of the facebook customers are small business, that benefit enormously from access to facebook, especially in the third world. They now have access to much larger pool of users. This drives economic growth and gradually brings prosperity to undeveloped countries, or disadvantaged small businesses. For example facebook has facebook light app, which is a lightweight app targeted for older phones. The way ads work on fb is very simple you sign up for fb account and then basically, can post your ad. There are million of ads in hundreds of languages, although facebook works day and night to remove violating content. I'm sure facebook fight with abusers never ends. If you do not understand how hard this problem is, you're probably, have never been exposed to fb scale before. Some companies, however, it seems, have given up on fighting the abuse altogether. For example, telegram has groups openly selling revenge porn, illegal heavy drugs, prostitution etc... Other companies bypass third world countries and disadvantageous population altogether, like apple whose premium priced product are out of reach for these people in need.
        JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > illegal heavy drugs, prostitution If drugs, sex work and slavery are the same to you, and others sort of doing it makes selling ads for it okay, Facebook might be a good fit.
        5y ago
  - FeistySkink 5y ago
    There are apps to buy servants (i.e. slaves) in the Middle East in Play Store.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - boringg 5y ago
      I think you might misunderstand the difference between slaves and servants, while similar it is not the same. I'm not condoning the behavior just want people to be accurate in their information.
      - FeistySkink 5y ago
        They are slaves though. What is not letting somebody leave, taking their passports while not paying them if not slavery?
  - deegles 5y ago
    It's dilution of responsibility. "Oh, I only work on optimizing page load times or other random feature, I can't be responsible for human trafficking!" Well... you [FB employees] kind of are.
    - lexapro 5y ago
      What about the actual human traffickers? Aren't they most responsible? What have you done to stop facebook?
      - blunte 5y ago
        The human trafficers, in some cases, are just simply ignorant. Some are intentionally malicious, but some are just born into a way of thinking and operating (which is often supported by their society and government). They can, in theory, learn that what they are doing is arguably very wrong. And some can decide to stop doing that. Meanwhile, we can make it less easy for them to do it by eliminating as many of the tools they use as possible. As for stopping Facebook, I don't know if anyone can. The most we can do is stop using it. Like some people, I maintain an account out of necessity for the unfortunate times that the only way I can find or communicate with a business or person is on that platform. But my account can go months without me logging in. If I were 20 years younger, I would be working on one of the open source community platforms or communication platforms in the hope of someday providing a an easy to use and ubiquitous product that would give normal people an alternative to FB. Maybe I still will now that I have quit my job.
    - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
      Are they though? it's not as if an average FB employee can do anything about it. Say they resign... then FB just gets someone else to do their job.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - blunte 5y ago
        The argument "if I don't do it, someone else will" is not effective. Sure, someone else just might. But it doesn't have to be you (the theoretical FB employee). You can take your talent and brainpower elsewhere, especially if you're good enough to get hired by FB.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image, but if they wanted to pay me lots of money to work on some open source project that was important to me, I'm not sure I would say no.
    - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
      >It's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. It's not so much that they are evil, it is that FB is optimising for FB's profits, which may conflict with other things that other people value, > I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image Uber is close, if not exceeding FB. I also get the impression that people are a good deal more cynical and hostile towards Google and Apple now than they were 10 years ago (I know I am).
      - blunte 5y ago
        Google gets trashed on because it was so bold about "do no evil" for so long, and because it keeps wrongly shutting down people's accounts. Oh, and because of its handling of internal sexual harassment and ethics complaints. Uber took advantage of drivers, misleading them about income and viability of making a good living. They also aggressively ignored local regulations to be able to unfairly compete with local services. As bad as that is, it's still many steps above knowingly facilitating human trafficing. Apple, for its many flaws, seems only to be semi-evil by probably knowingly allowing really bad labor practices at its Chinese factories. They either were knowingly failing to properly oversee, or they were intentionally ignoring. But it seems they have made an effort to improve in this regard.
    - StevePerkins 5y ago
      > "it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects)." Indeed. I would be very curious how many of the righteous in this thread are busy removing React from their web applications? Relay from their GraphQL API's? PyTorch from their data science projects? RocksDB from the endless number of infrastructure products that incorporate it? How do you hold that developer responsible for human slavery due to his or her work, while you and your shop continue happily exploiting that work yourselves?
  - cwyers 5y ago
    Okay, but how far down the stack does it go? If you are working at Cisco, should you be similarly horrified that human trafficking is being arranged using your company's routers? If you work at a Tier 1 Internet carrier, should you be horrified that people are arranging human trafficking over the backbone that you run? (Even if Facebook is more responsible than those parties, I think it's easy to understand how the median Facebook employee wouldn't see it that way, especially if their day-to-day job is something not directly having to do with communities/the newsfeed.)
    - LightG 5y ago
      Yes.
    - ipv6ipv4 5y ago
      Well, Apple did apparently set the example here. If you know about it? Yes.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > how far down the stack does it go? There are no hard rules, just values and precedents. If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it? If (1) and (2), we're at the Nuremberg threshold. That is, if the crime at hand rises to that of crimes against humanity, (1) and (2) alone should be enough. If it doesn't rise to that level, test (3) comes into question. "Stop" is an ambiguous term, as is "crimes against humanity," so there is a lot of subjectivity here. But to take your analogy, no, a San Francisco warehouse worker at Cisco wouldn't be culpable for e.g. their CFO bribing a foreign official. A content buyer at Instagram isn't responsible for the slave ads. But engineers deploying the ad systems, incentivized by ad metrics? Business development? Any executive at Facebook? Somewhat to totally culpable.
      - solveit 5y ago
        > If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it? Have you ever voted for any US representative or senator that got elected and wasn't Barbara Lee? Congratulations, your tests (1) and (2) say you're a war criminal.
  - jatins 5y ago
    I don't think blaming employees is the right thing here. These are hard problems to solve, and unless we have evidence that Facebook encourages, or does not try to ban content like this it's probably a strech to call them immoral. We are just beginning to understand the ill effects of social media, and these companies themselves acknowledge it. Plenty of people at these companies are working to solve these problems. What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email), which many times lead them to take decisions that are not at the best interest of consumer. I guess all ad supported VC businesses are bound to have this fate, though.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > evidence...does not try to ban content like this What would you call Apple pointing it out and Facebook continuing to monetize until Apple threatened to ban them from he App Store? > What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email) Are we really comparing the selling of ads for slavery with LinkedIn requiring clickthrough for their messages?
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    I don't work at FB (or Google), but this take seems naive. People simply don't have the ability to spend so much time dealing with what they probably consider fringe violations of morality. In their hierarchy of needs, this just doesn't rank very highly. Its reminiscent of people who believe the US is fundamentally evil and the people who live in and vote in the country are complicit. The atrocities of the US far outweigh those that FB has done. If these people are OK being US citizens, being employees of FB seems like nothing. And you extend this to being members of the military, the police, etc...
    - blunte 5y ago
      If one is born in the US, it's quite difficult to leave. Even if you leave, it's a long process to become a citizen elsewhere and give up your US citizenship. But one who chooses to work at Facebook (and reads HN) must know what goes on there; and they could choose a different, more ethical company. The police provide necessary services. Facebook does not provide a necessary service. Some would argue that they prevent other, better services from existing because of their critical mass and financial means. So while plenty of bad things are done by some police, the service has value. Ethics aside, the value of Facebook is very marginal based on many studies.
      - kenjackson 5y ago
        It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. Arguing against the value of FB is tough, given how much money it makes. In some sense, our society has determined that the BEST way to measure value is by how much money can it generate. By this measure FB has a lot of value. You personally may not like FB. But my point is that there are a probably a lot of things that you hold dear (or at least don't find overly offensive) that others consider to do FAR more harm than FB ever has.
        blunte 5y ago
        This is now off-topic, but ... > It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. With a US passport, you can go many places and stay for a short time. You cannot, however, stay indefinitely. If you try, you will face many obstacles and quite possibly fail and be ejected. Also, renouncing US citizenship is not like sending a letter or walking into an embassy and handing your passport back. There's an interview process and some financial preparation required. Lastly, even if you did renounce, and you're somehow allowed to live in another country while you go through the (lengthy) process to get a new passport, you are now stuck in that one place. You cannot go anywhere. This is certainly not something you would do unless you were really desperate. > It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. I was speaking of value to humanity, not value to FB execs and investors. This is not a money matter. Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing. By this logic, you could excuse anything because you could always point to something worse.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Slavery and human trafficking is illegal. How are their debates about moderating it? I haven’t seen any. It’s like calling for violence, there isn’t a question it has to be moderated. The gray areas are non illegal things like hate speech.
  - strulovich 5y ago
    There’s no question about moderating it, there’s a question of how aggressively and how complex the problem is. Should #slavery be blocked? That hashtag probably also used for protesting and reasonable things. So you can’t just block all these terms - you should try to only block the ones abused. Then, what about trickier terms? Once you block the words people start using code words instead. You need to constantly find these and remove them, and make sure you don’t block too many posts and people that didn’t deserve it.
1123581321 5y ago
Where could someone go to get a reliable list of suspicious phrases like that one? Granted, I don't know if I want to know...
bootlooped 5y ago
> Oftentimes, it's just strange dogwhistles to look out for like profiles of young women that say "Frycook at the Krusty Krab." Wait, does that actually mean something? I have seen it many times and assumed it was just an innocuous SpongeBob reference.
- bmcahren 5y ago
  I doubt it. I've used Krusty Krab as an employer on some sites. https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/krusty-krab-facebook-employment-listing https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/krusty-krab-facebook-emp... https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3d45t9/comment/ct2fqx8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3d45t9/commen... That reddit thread explains it pretty well. Facebook will nag you unless you provide an answer. Many people avoid associating themselves with their employer publicly and pop-culture is the first thing to come to mind.
olalonde 5y ago
Why do traffickers create Facebook profiles for their victims?
- lugged 5y ago
  Advertising.
warent 5y ago
This is something im really interested in. How did you get the information you needed to create the creep crawler? Was it effective at all? I'm a programmer and want to make something similar but have no idea where to start.

hef19898 5y ago

Everytime I think FB cannot be any worse, something like this comes up...

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> Human trafficking is rife on Facebook Even looking at HN’s reaction, which has a strong component rationalising for Facebook, it’s unsurprising that Facebook is itself divided on its responsibility to moderate. Even when we get to literal slavery. A risk from this is contagion. The fish rots from the head down. But it’s been rotting for some time. Those people will, after Facebook, move on to other roles of influence.

blunte 5y ago
What amazes me is that we know HN is full of FB employees/devs. How can someone work for a company that has such a history of doing or allowing dirty deeds, often suppressing the evidence. Starting from the very top of Facebook, it is a completely amoral company. Google, on the other hand, is just moreso just naive and seems to believe it can solve problems with AI, without human judgment or oversight.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  You could say the same for most companies though - Microsoft's dodgy QDOS and Mosaic deals, Amazon's warehouses and temp hiring practices.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > could say the same for most companies No, you couldn’t, because while those things aren’t great, they aren’t literal slavery being advertised while the person they’re paying the ad money to looks the other way.
    - sgregnt 5y ago
      I'd be honored to work for facebook. Most of the facebook customers are small business, that benefit enormously from access to facebook, especially in the third world. They now have access to much larger pool of users. This drives economic growth and gradually brings prosperity to undeveloped countries, or disadvantaged small businesses. For example facebook has facebook light app, which is a lightweight app targeted for older phones. The way ads work on fb is very simple you sign up for fb account and then basically, can post your ad. There are million of ads in hundreds of languages, although facebook works day and night to remove violating content. I'm sure facebook fight with abusers never ends. If you do not understand how hard this problem is, you're probably, have never been exposed to fb scale before. Some companies, however, it seems, have given up on fighting the abuse altogether. For example, telegram has groups openly selling revenge porn, illegal heavy drugs, prostitution etc... Other companies bypass third world countries and disadvantageous population altogether, like apple whose premium priced product are out of reach for these people in need.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > illegal heavy drugs, prostitution If drugs, sex work and slavery are the same to you, and others sort of doing it makes selling ads for it okay, Facebook might be a good fit.
        5y ago
- FeistySkink 5y ago
  There are apps to buy servants (i.e. slaves) in the Middle East in Play Store.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - boringg 5y ago
    I think you might misunderstand the difference between slaves and servants, while similar it is not the same. I'm not condoning the behavior just want people to be accurate in their information.
    - FeistySkink 5y ago
      They are slaves though. What is not letting somebody leave, taking their passports while not paying them if not slavery?
- deegles 5y ago
  It's dilution of responsibility. "Oh, I only work on optimizing page load times or other random feature, I can't be responsible for human trafficking!" Well... you [FB employees] kind of are.
  - lexapro 5y ago
    What about the actual human traffickers? Aren't they most responsible? What have you done to stop facebook?
    - blunte 5y ago
      The human trafficers, in some cases, are just simply ignorant. Some are intentionally malicious, but some are just born into a way of thinking and operating (which is often supported by their society and government). They can, in theory, learn that what they are doing is arguably very wrong. And some can decide to stop doing that. Meanwhile, we can make it less easy for them to do it by eliminating as many of the tools they use as possible. As for stopping Facebook, I don't know if anyone can. The most we can do is stop using it. Like some people, I maintain an account out of necessity for the unfortunate times that the only way I can find or communicate with a business or person is on that platform. But my account can go months without me logging in. If I were 20 years younger, I would be working on one of the open source community platforms or communication platforms in the hope of someday providing a an easy to use and ubiquitous product that would give normal people an alternative to FB. Maybe I still will now that I have quit my job.
  - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
    Are they though? it's not as if an average FB employee can do anything about it. Say they resign... then FB just gets someone else to do their job.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - blunte 5y ago
      The argument "if I don't do it, someone else will" is not effective. Sure, someone else just might. But it doesn't have to be you (the theoretical FB employee). You can take your talent and brainpower elsewhere, especially if you're good enough to get hired by FB.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image, but if they wanted to pay me lots of money to work on some open source project that was important to me, I'm not sure I would say no.
  - PontifexMinimus 5y ago
    >It's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. It's not so much that they are evil, it is that FB is optimising for FB's profits, which may conflict with other things that other people value, > I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image Uber is close, if not exceeding FB. I also get the impression that people are a good deal more cynical and hostile towards Google and Apple now than they were 10 years ago (I know I am).
    - blunte 5y ago
      Google gets trashed on because it was so bold about "do no evil" for so long, and because it keeps wrongly shutting down people's accounts. Oh, and because of its handling of internal sexual harassment and ethics complaints. Uber took advantage of drivers, misleading them about income and viability of making a good living. They also aggressively ignored local regulations to be able to unfairly compete with local services. As bad as that is, it's still many steps above knowingly facilitating human trafficing. Apple, for its many flaws, seems only to be semi-evil by probably knowingly allowing really bad labor practices at its Chinese factories. They either were knowingly failing to properly oversee, or they were intentionally ignoring. But it seems they have made an effort to improve in this regard.
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    > "it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects)." Indeed. I would be very curious how many of the righteous in this thread are busy removing React from their web applications? Relay from their GraphQL API's? PyTorch from their data science projects? RocksDB from the endless number of infrastructure products that incorporate it? How do you hold that developer responsible for human slavery due to his or her work, while you and your shop continue happily exploiting that work yourselves?
- cwyers 5y ago
  Okay, but how far down the stack does it go? If you are working at Cisco, should you be similarly horrified that human trafficking is being arranged using your company's routers? If you work at a Tier 1 Internet carrier, should you be horrified that people are arranging human trafficking over the backbone that you run? (Even if Facebook is more responsible than those parties, I think it's easy to understand how the median Facebook employee wouldn't see it that way, especially if their day-to-day job is something not directly having to do with communities/the newsfeed.)
  - LightG 5y ago
    Yes.
  - ipv6ipv4 5y ago
    Well, Apple did apparently set the example here. If you know about it? Yes.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > how far down the stack does it go? There are no hard rules, just values and precedents. If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it? If (1) and (2), we're at the Nuremberg threshold. That is, if the crime at hand rises to that of crimes against humanity, (1) and (2) alone should be enough. If it doesn't rise to that level, test (3) comes into question. "Stop" is an ambiguous term, as is "crimes against humanity," so there is a lot of subjectivity here. But to take your analogy, no, a San Francisco warehouse worker at Cisco wouldn't be culpable for e.g. their CFO bribing a foreign official. A content buyer at Instagram isn't responsible for the slave ads. But engineers deploying the ad systems, incentivized by ad metrics? Business development? Any executive at Facebook? Somewhat to totally culpable.
    - solveit 5y ago
      > If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it? Have you ever voted for any US representative or senator that got elected and wasn't Barbara Lee? Congratulations, your tests (1) and (2) say you're a war criminal.
- jatins 5y ago
  I don't think blaming employees is the right thing here. These are hard problems to solve, and unless we have evidence that Facebook encourages, or does not try to ban content like this it's probably a strech to call them immoral. We are just beginning to understand the ill effects of social media, and these companies themselves acknowledge it. Plenty of people at these companies are working to solve these problems. What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email), which many times lead them to take decisions that are not at the best interest of consumer. I guess all ad supported VC businesses are bound to have this fate, though.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > evidence...does not try to ban content like this What would you call Apple pointing it out and Facebook continuing to monetize until Apple threatened to ban them from he App Store? > What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email) Are we really comparing the selling of ads for slavery with LinkedIn requiring clickthrough for their messages?
- kenjackson 5y ago
  I don't work at FB (or Google), but this take seems naive. People simply don't have the ability to spend so much time dealing with what they probably consider fringe violations of morality. In their hierarchy of needs, this just doesn't rank very highly. Its reminiscent of people who believe the US is fundamentally evil and the people who live in and vote in the country are complicit. The atrocities of the US far outweigh those that FB has done. If these people are OK being US citizens, being employees of FB seems like nothing. And you extend this to being members of the military, the police, etc...
  - blunte 5y ago
    If one is born in the US, it's quite difficult to leave. Even if you leave, it's a long process to become a citizen elsewhere and give up your US citizenship. But one who chooses to work at Facebook (and reads HN) must know what goes on there; and they could choose a different, more ethical company. The police provide necessary services. Facebook does not provide a necessary service. Some would argue that they prevent other, better services from existing because of their critical mass and financial means. So while plenty of bad things are done by some police, the service has value. Ethics aside, the value of Facebook is very marginal based on many studies.
    - kenjackson 5y ago
      It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. Arguing against the value of FB is tough, given how much money it makes. In some sense, our society has determined that the BEST way to measure value is by how much money can it generate. By this measure FB has a lot of value. You personally may not like FB. But my point is that there are a probably a lot of things that you hold dear (or at least don't find overly offensive) that others consider to do FAR more harm than FB ever has.
      - blunte 5y ago
        This is now off-topic, but ... > It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. With a US passport, you can go many places and stay for a short time. You cannot, however, stay indefinitely. If you try, you will face many obstacles and quite possibly fail and be ejected. Also, renouncing US citizenship is not like sending a letter or walking into an embassy and handing your passport back. There's an interview process and some financial preparation required. Lastly, even if you did renounce, and you're somehow allowed to live in another country while you go through the (lengthy) process to get a new passport, you are now stuck in that one place. You cannot go anywhere. This is certainly not something you would do unless you were really desperate. > It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there. I was speaking of value to humanity, not value to FB execs and investors. This is not a money matter. Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing. By this logic, you could excuse anything because you could always point to something worse.
zpeti 5y ago
Slavery and human trafficking is illegal. How are their debates about moderating it? I haven’t seen any. It’s like calling for violence, there isn’t a question it has to be moderated. The gray areas are non illegal things like hate speech.
- strulovich 5y ago
  There’s no question about moderating it, there’s a question of how aggressively and how complex the problem is. Should #slavery be blocked? That hashtag probably also used for protesting and reasonable things. So you can’t just block all these terms - you should try to only block the ones abused. Then, what about trickier terms? Once you block the words people start using code words instead. You need to constantly find these and remove them, and make sure you don’t block too many posts and people that didn’t deserve it.

1123581321 5y ago

Where could someone go to get a reliable list of suspicious phrases like that one? Granted, I don't know if I want to know...

bootlooped 5y ago

> Oftentimes, it's just strange dogwhistles to look out for like profiles of young women that say "Frycook at the Krusty Krab." Wait, does that actually mean something? I have seen it many times and assumed it was just an innocuous SpongeBob reference.

bmcahren 5y ago
I doubt it. I've used Krusty Krab as an employer on some sites. https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/krusty-krab-facebook-employment-listing https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/krusty-krab-facebook-emp... https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3d45t9/comment/ct2fqx8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3d45t9/commen... That reddit thread explains it pretty well. Facebook will nag you unless you provide an answer. Many people avoid associating themselves with their employer publicly and pop-culture is the first thing to come to mind.

olalonde 5y ago

Why do traffickers create Facebook profiles for their victims?

lugged 5y ago
Advertising.

warent 5y ago

This is something im really interested in. How did you get the information you needed to create the creep crawler? Was it effective at all? I'm a programmer and want to make something similar but have no idea where to start.