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Facebook says it was wrong to ban Canadian MP’s Christmas message

208 points by smsm42 5y ago

waynecochran 5y ago
I wish everybody here a "Merry Christmas" celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ our God and Savior.
- masterof0 5y ago
  > our God and Savior *your God and Savior
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    Funny thing about the plural first person pronouns (we/us/our): it can mean several different things: 1. Me and them 2. Me and you 3. Me and you and them Your comment makes sense if GP meant 2 or 3, but if GP meant 1 then you're each saying the same thing (well, if you'll let your version be a plural second person, anyhow).
    - masterof0 5y ago
      Oh no, you are right, I was just pointing out that jeezuz is not my lord nor my savior.
      - kubbity 5y ago
        So what are you exactly celebrating at Christmas?
        masterof0 5y ago
        Capitalism.
      - collegeburner 5y ago
        If I spelled Muhammad as "Moohatmed" on purpose to indicate my dislike of Muslims I'd (correctly) be called Islamaphobic. So stop being Christianphobic.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      Some languages do have different pronouns for that, but unfortunately Indo-European languages lack this capability. It is called "clusivity". Outside IE languages, it seems to be a pretty common thing.
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    That's not what Christians believe. I've had Muslim friends who prayed for me when I had tough times and I didn't complain because I didn't practice their religion. It's the thought that counts. I think you focus on that part instead of the fact that somebody wishing happiness on you, probably from some existing resentment of Christians.
- eesmith 5y ago
  On this day, Thor's Day, I wish everyone here a "Merry Christmas" celebrating the Yule season. How appropriate to have our saturnalia on Saturn's Day this year!
annoyingnoob 5y ago
The 'censorship' narrative is wrong and tired. FB/Meta has no obligation to carry your speech. Thank God, FB/Meta is not the government and can administer their privately owned systems any way they want and you do not have to like that. You do not have to use FB/Meta.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  - gpm 5y ago
    The comment you replied to seems like a direct reply to the article to me, which starts with the first quote below and goes on to quote the politician saying the second one .... > If you're tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. > this is a glaring example of censorship and overreach by tech giant companies who control so much of the online space.”
    - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
      >If you're tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. That's the website slogan, not part of the article. If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > That's the website slogan, not part of the article. Yes. > If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship. Maybe if they reversed it with a time machine.
      - swlp21 5y ago
        I'm struggling to understand your reasoning : > If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship. Using a different example, I wanted to eat in a local restaurant [a privately owned company providing a public service entirely on their own terms] but I was refused entry because I am black and their "policies" [which is the reason I am given] prohibit entry to black people. I call attention to the situation by standing outside with a placard saying this restaurant treated me in a discriminatory way because I am black. The restaurant manager then comes to me and says, sorry that was a mistake caused by the 'patron classifier' [i.e. some vague entity that implies no actual person is at fault anywhere], and I can come in now. So, do I understand correctly that you would say the restaurant is not operating any type of discriminatory policy because it reversed the decision when attention was publicly drawn to it? To me, that reasoning does not seem to make sense. Being embarrassed into changing a decision does not stop your original decision being wrong in the first place. It simply means you want to stop attention being drawn to it and hope I will stop making a fuss if you make an exception for me on this occasion. You can continue making that same [wrong] decision for everyone else that is unable to complain and draw attention to their plight.
new_guy 5y ago
> “Sometimes our automated review systems get things wrong." And by 'automated review systems' they mean non-English speaking slave labourers in a third world sh*t hole getting paid pennies per day. It's time for people to just stop using them, it's literally just a website and not even a very good one. There's competitors out there with a hundred times the functionality and usability.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  "Just don't use it" doesn't apply to things with a network effect.
josephcsible 5y ago
If he weren't well-known enough for this to be news, there's a good chance this "mistake" would never have been corrected.
- userbinator 5y ago
  This is one instance of someone with a clear political affiliation; the question is whether it would happen to someone on the other side, or with little discernable political affiliation.
- warent 5y ago
  Facebook sucks and I never use them. That being said, Facebook moderators who manually review reports are routinely traumatized and diagnosed with PTSD, and Facebook catches fire for that. So I don't see how this can go both ways. How can we ask Facebook to automate this system and flame them for it not being thorough enough, and then simultaneously flame them for implementing the thorough system of human review? As much as the company sucks, this seems like a no win scenario that isn't fair even to a reasonable company.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Sounds like Facebook is more trouble than it’s worth.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    Might there be an option of 'put money down, demand a review before arbitrage, get your money back if you win' solution? The money should filter out spammers. The price should cover the actual costs to defend against DOS. The biggest issue would be that bad actors could get insight into how Facebook detects. But maybe more openness here would be good!
    - CamelCaseName 5y ago
      I feel like scammers would just put in stolen credit cards, then FB would get hit with fraudulent charges.
freitasm 5y ago
- munk-a 5y ago
  The site is definitely quite sketchy looking - but this article is fine and perfectly reasonable so I don't know if we really need to comment on the website itself. If the website were adding unnecessary spin then maybe it'd be of note but it didn't.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    It is always correct to consider the source of any message. The mere truth of a _statement_ is often not even 50% of the _message_ since every statement is framed and the frame is highly manipulable.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Do you have an objective source that confirms that truth is actually a 50/50 ratio between message and framing? Where did you hear that from? The truth of a statement is somewhat subjective but it's not helpful to be pedantic. I understand that authoritative media sources often frame stories in abhorrent ways and I have tuned out the media in general as a result. However, if I hear a plausible, factual statement from even a source I abhor, I can filter through the framing to find the truth in the statement. In today's world, I think it's an essential skill. Did Facebook accidentally ban an innocuous message? Seems plausible. Is Facebook known to engage in arbitrary flagging of content? Yes. Does this speak to the problematic nature of algorithmic fact-checking and moderation, a general theme of our era? Yes. Then it's worth discussing and it doesn't matter what source brought it to our attention.
      - Brian_K_White 5y ago
        Back up and ask why do you share anything from any source? If you have something to say, then, why don't you just say it yourself, instead of referencing someone else saying it? 3rd party, perhaps even recognized or respected, corroboration. The other source somehow is more authoritative and meaningful than the same message directly from yourself. This idea matters and should be considered because X says it. But if that source says both sensible and insensible things, espouses both virtuous and venal ideals, then the source has no value as source of authority or credeance. Rig up a speak&spell to randomly spit out statements. Once in a while, it will say something truthful. Now, so what? Why would you ever cite that speak&spell, no matter what it said, ever, on anything? And that's just a random neutral source, not an opinionated one that says actively and intentionally harmful things some % of the time. Even if the speak&spell says something you agree with and want to repeat, you still go try to find some other source who says the same thing, and unlike the speak&spell, has given anyone any reason to respect. At the very very least, you acknowledge the weak argument and say "I know it's X saying this but..."
sebow 5y ago
This would have been a mistake if it was facebook's first rodeo, it's not. For the last couple of years anything that used to be "Merry Christmas" was actively suppresed on mainstream social networks.Replaced with Happy holidays, whatever.A company adjusting this is fine,obviously(you don't have to repeatedly wish happy X, you just do it one time), however in the case of individuals where it's more common that a person only says Merry Christmas/Happy hanukkah/etc, we've repeatedly seen that such messages get "lost".Again, it's not a mistake, but then again if you point out that facebook actively engages in this behavior through leaked documents, nobody bats an eye.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Do you have some sources for further reading? That sounds disturbingly Orwellian.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    I don't like how those tin foil hats I used to laugh at were just ahead of their time. Your TV spying on you or your phone apps waging war against Christmas ...
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  It's possible that content-based suppression happens, but it's also possible that the genericized phrase organically generates more engagement by virtue of it being likeable to way more people. If all your followers celebrate the same holiday then it should be a wash but if huge chunks don't then it's purely the numbers doing their thing. Even some who celebrate the mentioned holiday might find the message exclusionary enough to not engage (a woke feedback loop, you could say), further burying it.
  - simplestats 5y ago
    I don't think they're talking about just getting the most likes, or whatever but rather censorship via shadow-banning or outright deleting posts. I have seen it happen, and suspect there are those that work to "poison" the algorithms to get them to shadow ban the political side the hacker doesn't like.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
If you are too big, you should be broken up
- khazhoux 5y ago
  In what way was the incorrect algorithmic take-down of the MP's Christmas message due to the size of FB?
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    If Facebook were forcibly broken into several federated social networks, then ones that kept making "mistakes" like this one would lose all of their users to ones that didn't.
    - khazhoux 5y ago
      If DOJ broke up FB, it would be split along business units. There is no possible outcome in which the core FB product would be split into "several federated social networks," which is a different technology and business altogether.
      - josephcsible 5y ago
        Why not? Isn't that what the Baby Bells were?
        khazhoux 5y ago
        The phone system was already a large collection of inter-operable regional system. Facebook (the core product) exists as a monolith. They would have to invent, built out, and scale up a completely new technology stack to support federation. That's not on the table. The potential break-up of FB would be along business units (Oculus, Insta, Ad Network, etc).
  - throwawayay02 5y ago
    "Oops the algorithm did it" cannot be an excuse for everything. Oh the algorithm did it? Then hold the people who developed/pushed for it responsible then. Oh it's hard to make algorithms that don't make terrible decisions? Maybe then you should remove those algorithms and, say, have an ad review team.
lanevorockz 5y ago
“Mistakenly”
- corey_moncure 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like your account has mostly been doing that. We ban such accounts, so if you would please review the guidelines and fix this, that would be good.
- throwaway19937 5y ago
  Never assume malice when machine learning will suffice as an explanation.
iammru 5y ago
All AI algorightms are "biased" by definition but FB biases are too extreme. The best thing for FB is to be broken up.
- walrus01 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - jfibron 5y ago
  - iammru 5y ago
    Not only conversatives. Liberals are also upset about vaccines misinformation, election fraud, etc. My point is that you have to 'train' the AI models somehow. FB introduces its own 'biases' on those models. They admitted this 'mistake' only because it affected a Canadian MP, otherwise I don't think they would have this for you or I. Their 'discrimation' policies are too broad for an automated system. FB exhorts too much power over information.
    - spunker540 5y ago
      OP’s point was probably that liberals upset about free markets is expected, while conservatives upset about free markets is rather more ironic
      - simplestats 5y ago
        There's an important nuance in between though, such as defending freedom of speech while still objecting to what someone says. It might be hypocrisy if the MP calls for a govt intervention (assuming he was some kind of free market advocate), but it was the poster here calling for breakup.
      - ultrablack 5y ago
        The “free market” we sipport really is competitio. Competition drives invention and progress. With FB, they have no direct competition and thus can control the free market of ideas. That is the problem. I this case the idea od wishing a merry christmas? Where does that end you think?
_yoqn 5y ago
[flagged]
- rhcom2 5y ago
  > If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. Thus it loses it's Section 230 immunity. This isn't true and not apart of section 230. > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
- jevoten 5y ago
  > If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. As far as I'm aware, picking and choosing, moderation, and editorial decisions, don't waive section 230 immunity. Although that is a US law, and the MP in question is Canadian, so I'm not sure how the jurisdictional issues would be decided.
- roenxi 5y ago
  The article says Facebook considers this a mistake in their censorship system; they aren't ok with banning Christmas messages. Although keeping an eye on them for signs of overt racism and religious bigotry is a good idea given the amount of power they have and their willingness to exercise it over political topics.
  - _yoqn 5y ago
    It's easy to blame the algo or some low level staffer when a platform gets called out publicly for blatant censorship. The ex-CEO of Twitter, Hipster Rasputin whatshisname, admitted that censoring the Biden laptop story from the NY Post in October 2020, and shutting down any account that shared the story, was a "mistake" and only reinstated the NY Post account 2 weeks after they said it was a mistake. Of course he blamed the Post because they "only" needed to delete the tweet with the link to the story in order to reinstate the account. If the ban was a "mistake" then why do they need to delete the tweet?
bjustin 5y ago
An automated system had a false-positive that was later corrected manually. The news here is that the system works?
- smsm42 5y ago
  The news there is that the system is so bad that it has a very high false-positive rate, including something that should never have been a false positive in any proper system. That's like the police arresting the mayor of San-Francisco for a robbery that happened at the same time in Miami, and was perpetrated by a male. Surely, they let her go after the lawyers got involved, but wouldn't you call a policeman who makes so obviously wrong arrest an idiot unfit for the job, regardless of the fact that the error was later corrected? Wouldn't you call for re-training, or maybe even firing such a policeman, even if you agree that there should be police in general and police work is important? I think if we design artificial idiots, and entrust them to gatekeep our society's communications, it's newsworthy to point that fact out.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    I always assume that these kinds of automatic censoring are largely based off user reporting. Arresting the mayor of San Fransisco for the robbery in Miami makes sense if hundreds of people called the police to report the mayor was the culprit. It's likely a bad arrest, but it's worth at least figuring out why so many people are reporting him. Unfortunately that allows bad actors to game the system, but not quickly responding to reports allows the truly heinous content to remain on the site for longer.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      I kinda have hard time believing a lot of people would report а Merry Christmas post as discriminatory. I'd believe it about any other political post, and I know there are some people who are triggered by any mention of religious holidays, but there wouldn't be hundreds of them flocking to brigade а relatively obscure Canadian politician. It just doesn't look like a realistic scenario. I think it's a pure artificial idiocy. I may have some conspiratorial thoughts about why artificial idiocy FB is designing leans in this particular direction, but since I don't have any data I'd just leave it at that.
throaway46546 5y ago
https://archive.ph/uLVGw https://archive.ph/uLVGw
annexrichmond 5y ago
Since we're on the topic of automated algorithms, one thought I had, which I have trouble wording the right way (maybe someone can help me out here): My problem with a lot of big tech compared to traditional companies is that they get to benefit from the economies of scale of software that affords them great profit margins and not deal with the consequences. For example, people constantly say that there's too much content for Facebook to moderate, etc. Then maybe this is a broken business model? Compare this to a mortgage servicer that is regulated to have sufficient customer support. Their budget to do this grows much more linearly while Facebook's budget for support, moderation etc grows far more logarithmically simply because they barely have any support. I'm not suggesting Facebook should be policing content per se, but they should be required to handle incidents in a timely fashion whether it's removing illegal activity (or reversing a mistake thereof), helping victims escalate harassment to authorities, or whatever. Yes, this costs a lot, but perhaps that should be the inherent cost of running such a platform.
- fouc 5y ago
  Companies like Facebook & Google are able to scale up in part because they're avoiding spending money and time on moderation & customer support. If they were legally required to maintain a certain level of support, then that would help curtail their speed of scaling up, and probably be a good thing in general.
- worker767424 5y ago
  Comparing customer service of Facebook to a mortgage servicer is tricky because of the value and the volume. Facebook has orders of magnitude (I'll get 10,000x more) content to moderate than a mortgage servicer where they really only answer questions when something goes wrong (3x every 5 years) the stakes are a million times higher. The options for social media are really free (or cheap) to use and occasionally bad moderation or pay $5 per post or comment ($10 for risky ones) that see multiple human moderators to limit abuse and false positives. Or no social media. My point is the amount and quality of moderation people say they want is more expensive than they'd pay for these services, but there's still a lot of value to them, so we're left with imperfect moderation.
joemazerino 5y ago
Twitter and Facebook tend to make these "mistakes" all too often focusing on one side of the political spectrum.
yob28 5y ago
namelessoracle 5y ago
I dont know how much longer we can view slippery slope as a logical fallacy. We mocked Fox News viewers when they did their "war on Christmas" claims, and then this.
- hackflip 5y ago
  Time and time again "crazy" conspiracy theorists end up being right.

208 points by smsm42 5y ago

waynecochran 5y ago

I wish everybody here a "Merry Christmas" celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ our God and Savior.

masterof0 5y ago
> our God and Savior *your God and Savior
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  Funny thing about the plural first person pronouns (we/us/our): it can mean several different things: 1. Me and them 2. Me and you 3. Me and you and them Your comment makes sense if GP meant 2 or 3, but if GP meant 1 then you're each saying the same thing (well, if you'll let your version be a plural second person, anyhow).
  - masterof0 5y ago
    Oh no, you are right, I was just pointing out that jeezuz is not my lord nor my savior.
    - kubbity 5y ago
      So what are you exactly celebrating at Christmas?
      - masterof0 5y ago
        Capitalism.
    - collegeburner 5y ago
      If I spelled Muhammad as "Moohatmed" on purpose to indicate my dislike of Muslims I'd (correctly) be called Islamaphobic. So stop being Christianphobic.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    Some languages do have different pronouns for that, but unfortunately Indo-European languages lack this capability. It is called "clusivity". Outside IE languages, it seems to be a pretty common thing.
- collegeburner 5y ago
  That's not what Christians believe. I've had Muslim friends who prayed for me when I had tough times and I didn't complain because I didn't practice their religion. It's the thought that counts. I think you focus on that part instead of the fact that somebody wishing happiness on you, probably from some existing resentment of Christians.
eesmith 5y ago
On this day, Thor's Day, I wish everyone here a "Merry Christmas" celebrating the Yule season. How appropriate to have our saturnalia on Saturn's Day this year!

annoyingnoob 5y ago

The 'censorship' narrative is wrong and tired. FB/Meta has no obligation to carry your speech. Thank God, FB/Meta is not the government and can administer their privately owned systems any way they want and you do not have to like that. You do not have to use FB/Meta.

JacobThreeThree 5y ago
- gpm 5y ago
  The comment you replied to seems like a direct reply to the article to me, which starts with the first quote below and goes on to quote the politician saying the second one .... > If you're tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. > this is a glaring example of censorship and overreach by tech giant companies who control so much of the online space.”
  - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
    >If you're tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. That's the website slogan, not part of the article. If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > That's the website slogan, not part of the article. Yes. > If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship. Maybe if they reversed it with a time machine.
    - swlp21 5y ago
      I'm struggling to understand your reasoning : > If Facebook reversed the decision, it's not censorship. Using a different example, I wanted to eat in a local restaurant [a privately owned company providing a public service entirely on their own terms] but I was refused entry because I am black and their "policies" [which is the reason I am given] prohibit entry to black people. I call attention to the situation by standing outside with a placard saying this restaurant treated me in a discriminatory way because I am black. The restaurant manager then comes to me and says, sorry that was a mistake caused by the 'patron classifier' [i.e. some vague entity that implies no actual person is at fault anywhere], and I can come in now. So, do I understand correctly that you would say the restaurant is not operating any type of discriminatory policy because it reversed the decision when attention was publicly drawn to it? To me, that reasoning does not seem to make sense. Being embarrassed into changing a decision does not stop your original decision being wrong in the first place. It simply means you want to stop attention being drawn to it and hope I will stop making a fuss if you make an exception for me on this occasion. You can continue making that same [wrong] decision for everyone else that is unable to complain and draw attention to their plight.

new_guy 5y ago

> “Sometimes our automated review systems get things wrong." And by 'automated review systems' they mean non-English speaking slave labourers in a third world sh*t hole getting paid pennies per day. It's time for people to just stop using them, it's literally just a website and not even a very good one. There's competitors out there with a hundred times the functionality and usability.

josephcsible 5y ago
"Just don't use it" doesn't apply to things with a network effect.

josephcsible 5y ago

If he weren't well-known enough for this to be news, there's a good chance this "mistake" would never have been corrected.

userbinator 5y ago
This is one instance of someone with a clear political affiliation; the question is whether it would happen to someone on the other side, or with little discernable political affiliation.
warent 5y ago
Facebook sucks and I never use them. That being said, Facebook moderators who manually review reports are routinely traumatized and diagnosed with PTSD, and Facebook catches fire for that. So I don't see how this can go both ways. How can we ask Facebook to automate this system and flame them for it not being thorough enough, and then simultaneously flame them for implementing the thorough system of human review? As much as the company sucks, this seems like a no win scenario that isn't fair even to a reasonable company.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Sounds like Facebook is more trouble than it’s worth.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Might there be an option of 'put money down, demand a review before arbitrage, get your money back if you win' solution? The money should filter out spammers. The price should cover the actual costs to defend against DOS. The biggest issue would be that bad actors could get insight into how Facebook detects. But maybe more openness here would be good!
  - CamelCaseName 5y ago
    I feel like scammers would just put in stolen credit cards, then FB would get hit with fraudulent charges.

freitasm 5y ago

munk-a 5y ago
The site is definitely quite sketchy looking - but this article is fine and perfectly reasonable so I don't know if we really need to comment on the website itself. If the website were adding unnecessary spin then maybe it'd be of note but it didn't.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  It is always correct to consider the source of any message. The mere truth of a _statement_ is often not even 50% of the _message_ since every statement is framed and the frame is highly manipulable.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Do you have an objective source that confirms that truth is actually a 50/50 ratio between message and framing? Where did you hear that from? The truth of a statement is somewhat subjective but it's not helpful to be pedantic. I understand that authoritative media sources often frame stories in abhorrent ways and I have tuned out the media in general as a result. However, if I hear a plausible, factual statement from even a source I abhor, I can filter through the framing to find the truth in the statement. In today's world, I think it's an essential skill. Did Facebook accidentally ban an innocuous message? Seems plausible. Is Facebook known to engage in arbitrary flagging of content? Yes. Does this speak to the problematic nature of algorithmic fact-checking and moderation, a general theme of our era? Yes. Then it's worth discussing and it doesn't matter what source brought it to our attention.
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Back up and ask why do you share anything from any source? If you have something to say, then, why don't you just say it yourself, instead of referencing someone else saying it? 3rd party, perhaps even recognized or respected, corroboration. The other source somehow is more authoritative and meaningful than the same message directly from yourself. This idea matters and should be considered because X says it. But if that source says both sensible and insensible things, espouses both virtuous and venal ideals, then the source has no value as source of authority or credeance. Rig up a speak&spell to randomly spit out statements. Once in a while, it will say something truthful. Now, so what? Why would you ever cite that speak&spell, no matter what it said, ever, on anything? And that's just a random neutral source, not an opinionated one that says actively and intentionally harmful things some % of the time. Even if the speak&spell says something you agree with and want to repeat, you still go try to find some other source who says the same thing, and unlike the speak&spell, has given anyone any reason to respect. At the very very least, you acknowledge the weak argument and say "I know it's X saying this but..."

sebow 5y ago

This would have been a mistake if it was facebook's first rodeo, it's not. For the last couple of years anything that used to be "Merry Christmas" was actively suppresed on mainstream social networks.Replaced with Happy holidays, whatever.A company adjusting this is fine,obviously(you don't have to repeatedly wish happy X, you just do it one time), however in the case of individuals where it's more common that a person only says Merry Christmas/Happy hanukkah/etc, we've repeatedly seen that such messages get "lost".Again, it's not a mistake, but then again if you point out that facebook actively engages in this behavior through leaked documents, nobody bats an eye.

userbinator 5y ago
Do you have some sources for further reading? That sounds disturbingly Orwellian.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  I don't like how those tin foil hats I used to laugh at were just ahead of their time. Your TV spying on you or your phone apps waging war against Christmas ...
hunter2_ 5y ago
It's possible that content-based suppression happens, but it's also possible that the genericized phrase organically generates more engagement by virtue of it being likeable to way more people. If all your followers celebrate the same holiday then it should be a wash but if huge chunks don't then it's purely the numbers doing their thing. Even some who celebrate the mentioned holiday might find the message exclusionary enough to not engage (a woke feedback loop, you could say), further burying it.
- simplestats 5y ago
  I don't think they're talking about just getting the most likes, or whatever but rather censorship via shadow-banning or outright deleting posts. I have seen it happen, and suspect there are those that work to "poison" the algorithms to get them to shadow ban the political side the hacker doesn't like.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

If you are too big, you should be broken up

khazhoux 5y ago
In what way was the incorrect algorithmic take-down of the MP's Christmas message due to the size of FB?
- josephcsible 5y ago
  If Facebook were forcibly broken into several federated social networks, then ones that kept making "mistakes" like this one would lose all of their users to ones that didn't.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    If DOJ broke up FB, it would be split along business units. There is no possible outcome in which the core FB product would be split into "several federated social networks," which is a different technology and business altogether.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Why not? Isn't that what the Baby Bells were?
      - khazhoux 5y ago
        The phone system was already a large collection of inter-operable regional system. Facebook (the core product) exists as a monolith. They would have to invent, built out, and scale up a completely new technology stack to support federation. That's not on the table. The potential break-up of FB would be along business units (Oculus, Insta, Ad Network, etc).
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  "Oops the algorithm did it" cannot be an excuse for everything. Oh the algorithm did it? Then hold the people who developed/pushed for it responsible then. Oh it's hard to make algorithms that don't make terrible decisions? Maybe then you should remove those algorithms and, say, have an ad review team.

lanevorockz 5y ago

“Mistakenly”

corey_moncure 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like your account has mostly been doing that. We ban such accounts, so if you would please review the guidelines and fix this, that would be good.
throwaway19937 5y ago
Never assume malice when machine learning will suffice as an explanation.

iammru 5y ago

All AI algorightms are "biased" by definition but FB biases are too extreme. The best thing for FB is to be broken up.

walrus01 5y ago
[flagged]
- jfibron 5y ago
- iammru 5y ago
  Not only conversatives. Liberals are also upset about vaccines misinformation, election fraud, etc. My point is that you have to 'train' the AI models somehow. FB introduces its own 'biases' on those models. They admitted this 'mistake' only because it affected a Canadian MP, otherwise I don't think they would have this for you or I. Their 'discrimation' policies are too broad for an automated system. FB exhorts too much power over information.
  - spunker540 5y ago
    OP’s point was probably that liberals upset about free markets is expected, while conservatives upset about free markets is rather more ironic
    - simplestats 5y ago
      There's an important nuance in between though, such as defending freedom of speech while still objecting to what someone says. It might be hypocrisy if the MP calls for a govt intervention (assuming he was some kind of free market advocate), but it was the poster here calling for breakup.
    - ultrablack 5y ago
      The “free market” we sipport really is competitio. Competition drives invention and progress. With FB, they have no direct competition and thus can control the free market of ideas. That is the problem. I this case the idea od wishing a merry christmas? Where does that end you think?

_yoqn 5y ago

[flagged]

rhcom2 5y ago
> If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. Thus it loses it's Section 230 immunity. This isn't true and not apart of section 230. > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
jevoten 5y ago
> If the platform picks and chooses what goes on its platform then it's a publisher, not a platform. As far as I'm aware, picking and choosing, moderation, and editorial decisions, don't waive section 230 immunity. Although that is a US law, and the MP in question is Canadian, so I'm not sure how the jurisdictional issues would be decided.
roenxi 5y ago
The article says Facebook considers this a mistake in their censorship system; they aren't ok with banning Christmas messages. Although keeping an eye on them for signs of overt racism and religious bigotry is a good idea given the amount of power they have and their willingness to exercise it over political topics.
- _yoqn 5y ago
  It's easy to blame the algo or some low level staffer when a platform gets called out publicly for blatant censorship. The ex-CEO of Twitter, Hipster Rasputin whatshisname, admitted that censoring the Biden laptop story from the NY Post in October 2020, and shutting down any account that shared the story, was a "mistake" and only reinstated the NY Post account 2 weeks after they said it was a mistake. Of course he blamed the Post because they "only" needed to delete the tweet with the link to the story in order to reinstate the account. If the ban was a "mistake" then why do they need to delete the tweet?

bjustin 5y ago

An automated system had a false-positive that was later corrected manually. The news here is that the system works?

smsm42 5y ago
The news there is that the system is so bad that it has a very high false-positive rate, including something that should never have been a false positive in any proper system. That's like the police arresting the mayor of San-Francisco for a robbery that happened at the same time in Miami, and was perpetrated by a male. Surely, they let her go after the lawyers got involved, but wouldn't you call a policeman who makes so obviously wrong arrest an idiot unfit for the job, regardless of the fact that the error was later corrected? Wouldn't you call for re-training, or maybe even firing such a policeman, even if you agree that there should be police in general and police work is important? I think if we design artificial idiots, and entrust them to gatekeep our society's communications, it's newsworthy to point that fact out.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  I always assume that these kinds of automatic censoring are largely based off user reporting. Arresting the mayor of San Fransisco for the robbery in Miami makes sense if hundreds of people called the police to report the mayor was the culprit. It's likely a bad arrest, but it's worth at least figuring out why so many people are reporting him. Unfortunately that allows bad actors to game the system, but not quickly responding to reports allows the truly heinous content to remain on the site for longer.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    I kinda have hard time believing a lot of people would report а Merry Christmas post as discriminatory. I'd believe it about any other political post, and I know there are some people who are triggered by any mention of religious holidays, but there wouldn't be hundreds of them flocking to brigade а relatively obscure Canadian politician. It just doesn't look like a realistic scenario. I think it's a pure artificial idiocy. I may have some conspiratorial thoughts about why artificial idiocy FB is designing leans in this particular direction, but since I don't have any data I'd just leave it at that.

throaway46546 5y ago

https://archive.ph/uLVGw https://archive.ph/uLVGw

annexrichmond 5y ago

Since we're on the topic of automated algorithms, one thought I had, which I have trouble wording the right way (maybe someone can help me out here): My problem with a lot of big tech compared to traditional companies is that they get to benefit from the economies of scale of software that affords them great profit margins and not deal with the consequences. For example, people constantly say that there's too much content for Facebook to moderate, etc. Then maybe this is a broken business model? Compare this to a mortgage servicer that is regulated to have sufficient customer support. Their budget to do this grows much more linearly while Facebook's budget for support, moderation etc grows far more logarithmically simply because they barely have any support. I'm not suggesting Facebook should be policing content per se, but they should be required to handle incidents in a timely fashion whether it's removing illegal activity (or reversing a mistake thereof), helping victims escalate harassment to authorities, or whatever. Yes, this costs a lot, but perhaps that should be the inherent cost of running such a platform.

fouc 5y ago
Companies like Facebook & Google are able to scale up in part because they're avoiding spending money and time on moderation & customer support. If they were legally required to maintain a certain level of support, then that would help curtail their speed of scaling up, and probably be a good thing in general.
worker767424 5y ago
Comparing customer service of Facebook to a mortgage servicer is tricky because of the value and the volume. Facebook has orders of magnitude (I'll get 10,000x more) content to moderate than a mortgage servicer where they really only answer questions when something goes wrong (3x every 5 years) the stakes are a million times higher. The options for social media are really free (or cheap) to use and occasionally bad moderation or pay $5 per post or comment ($10 for risky ones) that see multiple human moderators to limit abuse and false positives. Or no social media. My point is the amount and quality of moderation people say they want is more expensive than they'd pay for these services, but there's still a lot of value to them, so we're left with imperfect moderation.

joemazerino 5y ago

Twitter and Facebook tend to make these "mistakes" all too often focusing on one side of the political spectrum.

yob28 5y ago

namelessoracle 5y ago

I dont know how much longer we can view slippery slope as a logical fallacy. We mocked Fox News viewers when they did their "war on Christmas" claims, and then this.

hackflip 5y ago
Time and time again "crazy" conspiracy theorists end up being right.