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Automation is imperfect, and I wonder if the reality is that, if you can’t successfully automate the approval of ads or copyrighted material, or account suspens

Automation is imperfect, and I wonder if the reality is that, if you can’t successfully automate the approval of ads or copyrighted material, or account suspension, then maybe you’re too big or trying to do too much. Maybe the answer is that these things can’t ever be automated and if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I agree. At this scale these things must be automated. I don't buy that since they are automated these companies should get a pass. I tend to think that a lot of these problems can be attributed to too much tech consolidation.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
I am inclined to agree with you on automation being imperfect and that some things might not be automatable for now, at our current level of tech. However, I would add, that also non-automated processes have imperfection. There can be internal incentives to allow such ads. The FB culture is rich of processes which are profit-oriented rather than ethics-oriented. Who is to say, that such ads would not have been approved by some spineless group working at FB? I would not deem it impossible. Maybe after the 1000th ad you approve, you might become sort of blunt. Add to that a small signal from above, that this add would bring a lot of profit and you might wave it through as "Just another ad, how bad can it truly be?". I am unconvinced, that many people working at FB have high ethical standards and even less convinced, that FB puts people with high ethical standards in the position to approve ads. So in total, I am not convinced, that FB is actually capable of completely preventing such ads, even if they do not automate. This however, is not to say, that they should not be held accountable. They should. In full force. It is rather to say, that their business model is not appropriate and they cannot guarantee it to be ethically OK. (Ethically OK apart from the already ethically very questionable act of targetting ads and spying on everyone they can in the first place and doing that for their own gain / money.)
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  We are dancing around a conversation about accountability. Automated processes (or algorithms, romantically) currently diffuse accountability. This is a problem because we rely on rule of law to keep the peace. We would like corporations profiting off the algorithms to be held accountable, but this is hard today and lawmakers have moved too slowly on a solution. One alternative is to outlaw algorithms operating at a scale larger than our current accountability framework can handle. The reason this works is because it forces a human back into the chain of accountability. The corp will pass the potato and fire the employee who approved the ad. The employee's incentives are slightly more nuanced than you wrote - they want to maximize dollars while avoiding being fired. Since the employee is a regular human and not a corp with superlawyers and deep pockets, there's a better chance of criminal or civil followup targeting the former employee. With this accountable-scale bottleneck in place, we now have incentive for lawmakers and corporations to legislate the original problem and remove the bottleneck. That's why I think GP's proposal is a step forward. Even though the net harm may be the same at automation-scale and human-scale, the accountability envelope is closer to the desired end state.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Accountability is a lot more than having a name you can legally blame. Firing and suing ad approval worker #1632 for mistakenly approving 8 ads doesn't provide accountability towards solving the problem it provides a scapegoat.
  - anamax 5y ago
    A better alternative is to simply ignore how the companies arrive at a result and instead just look at what they do. Why do I care how Facebook implements their moderation? Their liability should be independent of their processes.
- treis 5y ago
  >I am inclined to agree with you on automation being imperfect and that some things might not be automatable for now, at our current level of tech. From TFA: >The group pulled the ads before they were posted or paid for I would not expect actual approval to come until the ads were paid for or posted. Otherwise, bad actors can test the automated filters for free until they find a way around them. Maybe the bad ads still get through, but IMHO the article is misleading.
cies 5y ago
> Automation is imperfect Maybe, just reaaaally maybe, this is not something that should be allowed to be automated. Could it be? There are other things in society we do not allow to be automated yet. And this might just be one of them. This is so disgusting. Made FB already a statement?
- mikkergp 5y ago
  It’s not a silver bullet, Human content moderation has its own ethical dilemmas.
  - OrsonSmelles 5y ago
    From a slightly cynical perspective, the biggest advantage to human moderation may be psychological: it's easy to choose who to blame for failures and often you can push that blame pretty far down the hierarchy to reduce the impression of organizational responsibility.
    - cies 5y ago
      But 4 ads inciting violence? C'mon, maybe you let one pass, pretty bad... but 4? Also, I dont think FB would let ads go unchecked in the USA: waaaaay too much hassle in case an "illlegal one" slips through. It's just that FB does not see the need to do that in Myanmar, as that govt can do them little harm.
      - thfuran 5y ago
        4 sounds like a tiny number even for a company far, far smaller than Facebook.
        cies 5y ago
        Sorry buy I cant help thinking you try to excuse them. I find it inexcusable to be honest.
- mountainb 5y ago
perihelions 5y ago
- "if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale" Wouldn't the direct alternative be a localized advertising business based in Myanmar? That would seem to be much worse, since the leadership would then be people who likely condone genocide (and are out of reach of Western laws/norms). (We're a bit too implicit about the fact that Silicon Valley corporations are American corporations, global projections of American power. If we neutralize them, we lose some things we haven't examined carefully).
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I don’t think this is an “us” vs “them” thing so much as a “person” vs “automated process” thing.
- _lqaf 5y ago
  I'm trying to understand: you would prefer that Facebook be complicit and turning a profit on genocide than not taking part?
  - perihelions 5y ago
    I don't understand the ground truth well enough to say, and I'm not going to be flippant in guessing. It *does* look double-edged to me: if you pull Western social media out of places like Myanmar, their replacements could be more destructive things. Their reliance on Western social media, for now, gives the West additional influence and levers in that country. I do agree Meta is using that influence badly, that their algorithms seem to be amplifying calls to violence rather than countering them.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
gtowey 5y ago
I agree. And when you consider that by pushing these negative externalities onto society, they save tons of money which goes into the pockets of their executives and investors, it begins to look like these companies have just invented a new form of theft. By "moving fast and breaking things" they hope to stay one step ahead of the regulators for long enough to get rich before society can react and close these loopholes.
throwawaygh 5y ago
Moderating a general-purpose forum for the world is intractable, either automatically or manually. That's just a fact. Acknowledging this fact does not need to be understood as a defense of Meta. I cannot offer any solutions for tackling this issue internationally, especially in cases such as genocide. The issue seems hopeless and not particularly unique to the internet (see: previous genocides and their use of new mass media such as newspapers in Germany, radio in Darfur). However, in the United States, I think the solution is ultimately local. Making specific and credible threats against someone is crime in all jurisdictions. Harassment using a telecommunications device is also a crime in most jurisdictions. Combining harassment with either vague threats or hate speech is sometimes its own crime. I've found, to my surprise, that the legal system is interested in internet harassment/threats even if the harassment/threat is "obviously trolling" by internet standards. The bad news is that there isn't a bright line and the bar is high. The good news is that the type of internet behavior that's been normalized in the past couple decades is so far beyond the pale that a bright line isn't even needed in many cases. E.g., - sending dozens of unrequited and extremely angry/hateful DMs to multiple unlinked accounts over weeks/months, even after requests to stop contacting the person, is clearly a criminal act called harassment, punishable by fines and jail time. - Doxxing a person who one has previously made threats against is clearly a criminal act called stalking, punishable by fines and jail time. - Telling someone that you think you know who they are, that you will figure out their IRL identity, and that you will then harm them in a specific way is clearly a credible threat. Again, a criminal act punishable by fines and jail time. These are all very common types of trolling. I would have thought that the lines were fuzzier from my long tenure on the internet, and that courts/police would respond with their equivalent of "ignore it and don't feed the trolls". But it turns out that these anti-social behaviors are not normal outside of very specific internet subcultures, and judges/detectives/DAs have spent approximately zero hours in internet cesspools. To them, all of the above are alarming, obviously criminal, and not examples of cases where one should simply ignore the behavior and go on with life. I've found that even respected moderators of respected forums will disregard as "just trolling" behavior that my DA's office and local detectives describe as "obviously criminal". Facebook and Twitter will also refuse to ban accounts that are engaged in harassment/threats/stalking behavior that the local DA is interested in prosecuting. I'm also working a few attorney friends -- and spending some change -- on developing a repeatable, low-cost, DIY-as-possible civil strategy for unmasking and obtaining restraining orders against John Doe harassers. The days of "threatening and harassing people on the internet" being "normal troll behavior" are going to come to a rude close for US residents over the next ten years, mostly on the back of serious misdemeanors and innovation in the use of civil lawsuits.
allie1 5y ago
What they’ve said basically is: we can’t possibly review all ads to ensure we don’t encourage violence, so between the choices: a) review all ads, charge per request or just operate slower until our automation is 100% accurate OR b) accept that 0.005% of the time, ads promoting violence and worse will get posted, and cause harm.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  It’s mind boggling that they don’t have some filter words that automatically flag an ad as potentially higher-risk for a policy violation and so require human review. Like the word “kill”, for example, seems like a word that should be flagged and yet according to the article it was approved. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. I’m sure Facebook has plenty of intelligent people who are more than capable of creating a risk-based review process that balances the effort vs the outcome better than whatever they’re currently doing.
  - allie1 5y ago
    Indeed. Even a “any ad mentioning these words goes for review” makes a difference. it has to be a culture issue inside fb. So much of this is just wrong, to go on without much scrutiny and get to this point is just mind boggling.
unfocused 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment. They are scaling and automating to increase profit, by reducing employee count that needs to do this work. The problem is, mistakes in this domain have greater world wide consequences than one company losing some money. They need to step away from this if it's not managed better. This is now an ethics problem, and not a financial one, even though some Facebook execs may not see it this way.
JonChesterfield 5y ago
It can't be spun as 'we sell so many ads we can't check them all'. It's 'we don't check them all because that's cheaper'. Unless the price of the ad is so low that paying to review it is a loss, in which case don't sell at that price, or treat it as a loss leader.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  And the more ads they check the more non-compliant ads they’ll find. So it would not only increase costs but reduce revenue, too.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > It can't be spun as 'we sell so many ads we can't check them all'. It's 'we don't check them all because that's cheaper'. Unless the price of the ad is so low that paying to review it is a loss, in which case don't sell at that price, or treat it as a loss leader. Or maybe more precisely: "we don't check them all because our business model wouldn't support it." The arrogant (and false) implication there is that making their business model work is the highest priority, and all of society's other priorities should take a back seat to it. If your business model only works with shitty automation that doesn't actually do its job, then you need to find a different business model.
cpeterso 5y ago
Ads with words like “kill” should probably be flagged for human review. How can that not be the case?
mbesto 5y ago
> Maybe the answer is that these things can’t ever be automated and if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale. That's exactly the argument. Social media's gross margins are artificially inflated because they don't take into consideration the external costs associated with them. Traditional media businesses never got to scale to FB level and enterprise value for exactly this reason.
jimmaswell 5y ago
I think we should just accept that a very small amount of mistakes like this will happen, just like manufacturing defects that would never happen if every Honda Civic was made entirely by hand. It's a reasonable price for the scale of the service.
- dangerlibrary 5y ago
  Why? I get no discernible benefit as a user / customer from Facebook operating at this scale. Why would I "just accept" this? Your comment reads like this: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    Ok, so which ones of your family/friends will move to a different platform? How will you divide it? Restrict each platform by age and geolocation? Only people born in 1980 USA can be on Facebook, the rest has to go the the platform they are allowed on.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    People on HN won't admit it for some reason, but the population really does get a lot of value using Facebook to find old friends, organize family gatherings, post their business info, buy/sell things, and yes, advertise. Services at this scale are genuinely useful to society. Does any other comparable service have a team of millions of humans to manually comb over every single ad when AI gets it right 99.99% of the time?
    - dangerlibrary 5y ago
      Why does the advertising platform need to be the same service as the tool for finding old friends? Why do either of those things need to be bundled with an event planning tool? Why is that combined service serving the vast majority of the populations of both Indonesia and Canada (for example)? My point is simply that I, and the vast majority of businesses, would get the exact same value from Facebook if it operated at the scale of a single country or even more locally. Or if it were one of many competing platforms that each had a far smaller market share. To be clear: I know the answer, in economic terms - economies of scale, network effects, etc. But also I don't care about that, because none of that matters to me. And the downsides (and externalities) of having a single giant service functioning at this scale are massive. The costs are large, and the benefit to me is small. That's why "we just need to accept it" is an absurd argument to me - I don't personally benefit from Facebook being as large as it is, and I would experience no great personal or professional loss if Facebook were far, far smaller.
mc32 5y ago
I don’t see why they can’t do what newspapers did in the past. Each ad got reviewed. It’ll cost more, but at least we can ensure there was some review of some type. Obviously we can anticipate errors in judgement but at least we can have someone who is responsible for letting something on. That said of course, what’s good for the gander might not be what’s good for the goose. So something may be legal in Timbuktu but not in Shangri-La. Moreover one can’t aim ti please everyone. How do you meet local regulation in Russia or China but also abide by second or third party laws? Or contend with public opinion (cancel culture, boycotts, moral outrage, etc).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
strogonoff 5y ago
One of the many problems with the double-sided ad money powered markets of Big Social, presented as “free” platforms to users, is skewed incentives. An individual user does not bring any revenue. If they are horrified by an ad they cannot just vote with their wallet and switch to a competitor (network effect together with free offer guarantee no honest business can really compete). Meanwhile, the only metric that matters to actual paying customers (advertisers) is eyeball count—they are not going to leave in droves if this platform is where the users are. Thus, letting the number of actual human staff grow to address some concern that involves end user satisfaction (including lofty goals like ethics, which is higher up the pyramid of end user satisfaction) is financially irrational to them, and automation rules. Sadly, this creates a situation where many people call for FB to be regulated. In my view, it will only make the situation worse by entrenching FB’s monopoly—rather, what we need is a general regulation that makes these types of businesses infeasible, so that we have a choice of smaller providers who charge their users (and are incentivized to make a product that benefits them) and interoperate with each other (and have to worry about users leaving). Instead of giving up on free market, we should make it work.
kornhole 5y ago
I think most on this thread have said enough for us to realize the problems with centralized moderation. Federated social media does resolve most of this with community moderation. Thousands of communities are already running their own federated social media instances. Mastodon is the most widely used, but others are seen at fediverse.party. It is not perfect and only millions of people are on it currently.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I agree. At this scale these things must be automated. I don't buy that since they are automated these companies should get a pass. I tend to think that a lot of these problems can be attributed to too much tech consolidation.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

I am inclined to agree with you on automation being imperfect and that some things might not be automatable for now, at our current level of tech. However, I would add, that also non-automated processes have imperfection. There can be internal incentives to allow such ads. The FB culture is rich of processes which are profit-oriented rather than ethics-oriented. Who is to say, that such ads would not have been approved by some spineless group working at FB? I would not deem it impossible. Maybe after the 1000th ad you approve, you might become sort of blunt. Add to that a small signal from above, that this add would bring a lot of profit and you might wave it through as "Just another ad, how bad can it truly be?". I am unconvinced, that many people working at FB have high ethical standards and even less convinced, that FB puts people with high ethical standards in the position to approve ads. So in total, I am not convinced, that FB is actually capable of completely preventing such ads, even if they do not automate. This however, is not to say, that they should not be held accountable. They should. In full force. It is rather to say, that their business model is not appropriate and they cannot guarantee it to be ethically OK. (Ethically OK apart from the already ethically very questionable act of targetting ads and spying on everyone they can in the first place and doing that for their own gain / money.)

somehnacct3757 5y ago
We are dancing around a conversation about accountability. Automated processes (or algorithms, romantically) currently diffuse accountability. This is a problem because we rely on rule of law to keep the peace. We would like corporations profiting off the algorithms to be held accountable, but this is hard today and lawmakers have moved too slowly on a solution. One alternative is to outlaw algorithms operating at a scale larger than our current accountability framework can handle. The reason this works is because it forces a human back into the chain of accountability. The corp will pass the potato and fire the employee who approved the ad. The employee's incentives are slightly more nuanced than you wrote - they want to maximize dollars while avoiding being fired. Since the employee is a regular human and not a corp with superlawyers and deep pockets, there's a better chance of criminal or civil followup targeting the former employee. With this accountable-scale bottleneck in place, we now have incentive for lawmakers and corporations to legislate the original problem and remove the bottleneck. That's why I think GP's proposal is a step forward. Even though the net harm may be the same at automation-scale and human-scale, the accountability envelope is closer to the desired end state.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Accountability is a lot more than having a name you can legally blame. Firing and suing ad approval worker #1632 for mistakenly approving 8 ads doesn't provide accountability towards solving the problem it provides a scapegoat.
- anamax 5y ago
  A better alternative is to simply ignore how the companies arrive at a result and instead just look at what they do. Why do I care how Facebook implements their moderation? Their liability should be independent of their processes.
treis 5y ago
>I am inclined to agree with you on automation being imperfect and that some things might not be automatable for now, at our current level of tech. From TFA: >The group pulled the ads before they were posted or paid for I would not expect actual approval to come until the ads were paid for or posted. Otherwise, bad actors can test the automated filters for free until they find a way around them. Maybe the bad ads still get through, but IMHO the article is misleading.

cies 5y ago

> Automation is imperfect Maybe, just reaaaally maybe, this is not something that should be allowed to be automated. Could it be? There are other things in society we do not allow to be automated yet. And this might just be one of them. This is so disgusting. Made FB already a statement?

mikkergp 5y ago
It’s not a silver bullet, Human content moderation has its own ethical dilemmas.
- OrsonSmelles 5y ago
  From a slightly cynical perspective, the biggest advantage to human moderation may be psychological: it's easy to choose who to blame for failures and often you can push that blame pretty far down the hierarchy to reduce the impression of organizational responsibility.
  - cies 5y ago
    But 4 ads inciting violence? C'mon, maybe you let one pass, pretty bad... but 4? Also, I dont think FB would let ads go unchecked in the USA: waaaaay too much hassle in case an "illlegal one" slips through. It's just that FB does not see the need to do that in Myanmar, as that govt can do them little harm.
    - thfuran 5y ago
      4 sounds like a tiny number even for a company far, far smaller than Facebook.
      - cies 5y ago
        Sorry buy I cant help thinking you try to excuse them. I find it inexcusable to be honest.
mountainb 5y ago

perihelions 5y ago

- "if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale" Wouldn't the direct alternative be a localized advertising business based in Myanmar? That would seem to be much worse, since the leadership would then be people who likely condone genocide (and are out of reach of Western laws/norms). (We're a bit too implicit about the fact that Silicon Valley corporations are American corporations, global projections of American power. If we neutralize them, we lose some things we haven't examined carefully).

elliekelly 5y ago
I don’t think this is an “us” vs “them” thing so much as a “person” vs “automated process” thing.
_lqaf 5y ago
I'm trying to understand: you would prefer that Facebook be complicit and turning a profit on genocide than not taking part?
- perihelions 5y ago
  I don't understand the ground truth well enough to say, and I'm not going to be flippant in guessing. It *does* look double-edged to me: if you pull Western social media out of places like Myanmar, their replacements could be more destructive things. Their reliance on Western social media, for now, gives the West additional influence and levers in that country. I do agree Meta is using that influence badly, that their algorithms seem to be amplifying calls to violence rather than countering them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

gtowey 5y ago

I agree. And when you consider that by pushing these negative externalities onto society, they save tons of money which goes into the pockets of their executives and investors, it begins to look like these companies have just invented a new form of theft. By "moving fast and breaking things" they hope to stay one step ahead of the regulators for long enough to get rich before society can react and close these loopholes.

throwawaygh 5y ago

Moderating a general-purpose forum for the world is intractable, either automatically or manually. That's just a fact. Acknowledging this fact does not need to be understood as a defense of Meta. I cannot offer any solutions for tackling this issue internationally, especially in cases such as genocide. The issue seems hopeless and not particularly unique to the internet (see: previous genocides and their use of new mass media such as newspapers in Germany, radio in Darfur). However, in the United States, I think the solution is ultimately local. Making specific and credible threats against someone is crime in all jurisdictions. Harassment using a telecommunications device is also a crime in most jurisdictions. Combining harassment with either vague threats or hate speech is sometimes its own crime. I've found, to my surprise, that the legal system is interested in internet harassment/threats even if the harassment/threat is "obviously trolling" by internet standards. The bad news is that there isn't a bright line and the bar is high. The good news is that the type of internet behavior that's been normalized in the past couple decades is so far beyond the pale that a bright line isn't even needed in many cases. E.g., - sending dozens of unrequited and extremely angry/hateful DMs to multiple unlinked accounts over weeks/months, even after requests to stop contacting the person, is clearly a criminal act called harassment, punishable by fines and jail time. - Doxxing a person who one has previously made threats against is clearly a criminal act called stalking, punishable by fines and jail time. - Telling someone that you think you know who they are, that you will figure out their IRL identity, and that you will then harm them in a specific way is clearly a credible threat. Again, a criminal act punishable by fines and jail time. These are all very common types of trolling. I would have thought that the lines were fuzzier from my long tenure on the internet, and that courts/police would respond with their equivalent of "ignore it and don't feed the trolls". But it turns out that these anti-social behaviors are not normal outside of very specific internet subcultures, and judges/detectives/DAs have spent approximately zero hours in internet cesspools. To them, all of the above are alarming, obviously criminal, and not examples of cases where one should simply ignore the behavior and go on with life. I've found that even respected moderators of respected forums will disregard as "just trolling" behavior that my DA's office and local detectives describe as "obviously criminal". Facebook and Twitter will also refuse to ban accounts that are engaged in harassment/threats/stalking behavior that the local DA is interested in prosecuting. I'm also working a few attorney friends -- and spending some change -- on developing a repeatable, low-cost, DIY-as-possible civil strategy for unmasking and obtaining restraining orders against John Doe harassers. The days of "threatening and harassing people on the internet" being "normal troll behavior" are going to come to a rude close for US residents over the next ten years, mostly on the back of serious misdemeanors and innovation in the use of civil lawsuits.

allie1 5y ago

What they’ve said basically is: we can’t possibly review all ads to ensure we don’t encourage violence, so between the choices: a) review all ads, charge per request or just operate slower until our automation is 100% accurate OR b) accept that 0.005% of the time, ads promoting violence and worse will get posted, and cause harm.

elliekelly 5y ago
It’s mind boggling that they don’t have some filter words that automatically flag an ad as potentially higher-risk for a policy violation and so require human review. Like the word “kill”, for example, seems like a word that should be flagged and yet according to the article it was approved. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. I’m sure Facebook has plenty of intelligent people who are more than capable of creating a risk-based review process that balances the effort vs the outcome better than whatever they’re currently doing.
- allie1 5y ago
  Indeed. Even a “any ad mentioning these words goes for review” makes a difference. it has to be a culture issue inside fb. So much of this is just wrong, to go on without much scrutiny and get to this point is just mind boggling.

unfocused 5y ago

I agree with your sentiment. They are scaling and automating to increase profit, by reducing employee count that needs to do this work. The problem is, mistakes in this domain have greater world wide consequences than one company losing some money. They need to step away from this if it's not managed better. This is now an ethics problem, and not a financial one, even though some Facebook execs may not see it this way.

JonChesterfield 5y ago

It can't be spun as 'we sell so many ads we can't check them all'. It's 'we don't check them all because that's cheaper'. Unless the price of the ad is so low that paying to review it is a loss, in which case don't sell at that price, or treat it as a loss leader.

elliekelly 5y ago
And the more ads they check the more non-compliant ads they’ll find. So it would not only increase costs but reduce revenue, too.
tablespoon 5y ago
> It can't be spun as 'we sell so many ads we can't check them all'. It's 'we don't check them all because that's cheaper'. Unless the price of the ad is so low that paying to review it is a loss, in which case don't sell at that price, or treat it as a loss leader. Or maybe more precisely: "we don't check them all because our business model wouldn't support it." The arrogant (and false) implication there is that making their business model work is the highest priority, and all of society's other priorities should take a back seat to it. If your business model only works with shitty automation that doesn't actually do its job, then you need to find a different business model.

cpeterso 5y ago

Ads with words like “kill” should probably be flagged for human review. How can that not be the case?

mbesto 5y ago

> Maybe the answer is that these things can’t ever be automated and if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale. That's exactly the argument. Social media's gross margins are artificially inflated because they don't take into consideration the external costs associated with them. Traditional media businesses never got to scale to FB level and enterprise value for exactly this reason.

jimmaswell 5y ago

I think we should just accept that a very small amount of mistakes like this will happen, just like manufacturing defects that would never happen if every Honda Civic was made entirely by hand. It's a reasonable price for the scale of the service.

dangerlibrary 5y ago
Why? I get no discernible benefit as a user / customer from Facebook operating at this scale. Why would I "just accept" this? Your comment reads like this: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Ok, so which ones of your family/friends will move to a different platform? How will you divide it? Restrict each platform by age and geolocation? Only people born in 1980 USA can be on Facebook, the rest has to go the the platform they are allowed on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  People on HN won't admit it for some reason, but the population really does get a lot of value using Facebook to find old friends, organize family gatherings, post their business info, buy/sell things, and yes, advertise. Services at this scale are genuinely useful to society. Does any other comparable service have a team of millions of humans to manually comb over every single ad when AI gets it right 99.99% of the time?
  - dangerlibrary 5y ago
    Why does the advertising platform need to be the same service as the tool for finding old friends? Why do either of those things need to be bundled with an event planning tool? Why is that combined service serving the vast majority of the populations of both Indonesia and Canada (for example)? My point is simply that I, and the vast majority of businesses, would get the exact same value from Facebook if it operated at the scale of a single country or even more locally. Or if it were one of many competing platforms that each had a far smaller market share. To be clear: I know the answer, in economic terms - economies of scale, network effects, etc. But also I don't care about that, because none of that matters to me. And the downsides (and externalities) of having a single giant service functioning at this scale are massive. The costs are large, and the benefit to me is small. That's why "we just need to accept it" is an absurd argument to me - I don't personally benefit from Facebook being as large as it is, and I would experience no great personal or professional loss if Facebook were far, far smaller.

mc32 5y ago

I don’t see why they can’t do what newspapers did in the past. Each ad got reviewed. It’ll cost more, but at least we can ensure there was some review of some type. Obviously we can anticipate errors in judgement but at least we can have someone who is responsible for letting something on. That said of course, what’s good for the gander might not be what’s good for the goose. So something may be legal in Timbuktu but not in Shangri-La. Moreover one can’t aim ti please everyone. How do you meet local regulation in Russia or China but also abide by second or third party laws? Or contend with public opinion (cancel culture, boycotts, moral outrage, etc).

deleted 5y ago

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strogonoff 5y ago

One of the many problems with the double-sided ad money powered markets of Big Social, presented as “free” platforms to users, is skewed incentives. An individual user does not bring any revenue. If they are horrified by an ad they cannot just vote with their wallet and switch to a competitor (network effect together with free offer guarantee no honest business can really compete). Meanwhile, the only metric that matters to actual paying customers (advertisers) is eyeball count—they are not going to leave in droves if this platform is where the users are. Thus, letting the number of actual human staff grow to address some concern that involves end user satisfaction (including lofty goals like ethics, which is higher up the pyramid of end user satisfaction) is financially irrational to them, and automation rules. Sadly, this creates a situation where many people call for FB to be regulated. In my view, it will only make the situation worse by entrenching FB’s monopoly—rather, what we need is a general regulation that makes these types of businesses infeasible, so that we have a choice of smaller providers who charge their users (and are incentivized to make a product that benefits them) and interoperate with each other (and have to worry about users leaving). Instead of giving up on free market, we should make it work.

kornhole 5y ago

I think most on this thread have said enough for us to realize the problems with centralized moderation. Federated social media does resolve most of this with community moderation. Thousands of communities are already running their own federated social media instances. Mastodon is the most widely used, but others are seen at fediverse.party. It is not perfect and only millions of people are on it currently.