4 ms·

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.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      He's Canada's version of a member of the House of Representatives, and it's the kind of thing that's probably done by relative number of reports vs number of views so being less well known would make it easier for a small group to achieve.
  - joelbondurant0 5y ago
- 46756e 5y ago
  Not saying this justifies anything, but at least the reasoning for the high false positive rate is simple. Facebook gets a lot of bad PR for having lots of misinformation. It makes sense from a business perspective to overcorrect, because general public is way more angry about potential misinformation than people having their normal posts taken down. Again, not saying it’s justified, but having 1 major anti-vaccine post get through would be way worse for public image then 100 Christmas greetings being taken down and then corrected.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    "because general public is way more angry about potential misinformation than people having their normal posts taken down" It may feel that way from inside Facebook, headquartered in a place so left wing it's basically decriminalized theft. It doesn't look that way from many other parts of the world, where many people believe that "misinformation" is a dystopian propaganda term meaning any statement unacceptable to the hard left, that "fact checking" is a joke and that all kinds of important and useful information is being censored by tech firms.
majou 5y ago
While I'd love to be optimistic, not all of us are Canadian members of parliament.
freeflight 5y ago
Imagine if this guy wasn't a Canadian MP, and instead just some random person without reach or influence. Do you think this would still have gotten noticed solved as quickly as it did? Stuff like this always reminds me about this story [0], that became only a story because the editor of a rather well known Norwegian newspaper ran into that problem himself. There is no telling how many people before him ran into the same issue, and just went; "Well, I guess then I can't do anything about it" because they didn't have the ability to publish this issue in a renowned traditional news media, which actually gets it attention. At best those other people might have described their experience somewhere, and probably got called conspiracy nuts for it. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

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.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    He's Canada's version of a member of the House of Representatives, and it's the kind of thing that's probably done by relative number of reports vs number of views so being less well known would make it easier for a small group to achieve.
- joelbondurant0 5y ago
46756e 5y ago
Not saying this justifies anything, but at least the reasoning for the high false positive rate is simple. Facebook gets a lot of bad PR for having lots of misinformation. It makes sense from a business perspective to overcorrect, because general public is way more angry about potential misinformation than people having their normal posts taken down. Again, not saying it’s justified, but having 1 major anti-vaccine post get through would be way worse for public image then 100 Christmas greetings being taken down and then corrected.
- native_samples 5y ago
  "because general public is way more angry about potential misinformation than people having their normal posts taken down" It may feel that way from inside Facebook, headquartered in a place so left wing it's basically decriminalized theft. It doesn't look that way from many other parts of the world, where many people believe that "misinformation" is a dystopian propaganda term meaning any statement unacceptable to the hard left, that "fact checking" is a joke and that all kinds of important and useful information is being censored by tech firms.

majou 5y ago

While I'd love to be optimistic, not all of us are Canadian members of parliament.

freeflight 5y ago

Imagine if this guy wasn't a Canadian MP, and instead just some random person without reach or influence. Do you think this would still have gotten noticed solved as quickly as it did? Stuff like this always reminds me about this story [0], that became only a story because the editor of a rather well known Norwegian newspaper ran into that problem himself. There is no telling how many people before him ran into the same issue, and just went; "Well, I guess then I can't do anything about it" because they didn't have the ability to publish this issue in a renowned traditional news media, which actually gets it attention. At best those other people might have described their experience somewhere, and probably got called conspiracy nuts for it. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031