8 ms·
> Our website makes no money. All of our moderators are volunteers. It took Facebook (with a 24/7 staff of paid moderators) 29 minutes to remove the Christchurc
by schleck8 4y ago
> Our website makes no money. All of our moderators are volunteers. It took Facebook (with a 24/7 staff of paid moderators) 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch shooting from Facebook Live.
You can read a hint of self-awareness between the lines here.
'yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money, but we are sadly lacking ressources to prevent those users from casually partaking in and moderating our site for years'
- worldofmatthew 4y agoThat's false equivalence on your part. Downgrading a violent threat to compare it to shit-posting is logically incorrect. The website points out that it took Facebook 29 minutes to ban a live-stream of an active terrorist attack, a social media platform who has enough money to do better. A forum with volunteers monitoring taking down a threat in around 1 hour is incredibly quick.
- schleck8 4y ago> There is also a false equivalent on your part. The livestream (which by the way was shared by the Kiwifarms owner) was spread on Facebook by many users. Facebook deployed a fingerprinting solution to identify this video being reposted. Not just taking it down once, but taking down all submissions. Noone expects that from Kiwifarms because they don't need it anyways. No matter what they tell you, they don't have that big of a comment stream. It takes less than 30 seconds to find an account with some Nazist symbolism in username or profile picture and they persist for years. Tell me how that adds up please.
- towaway15463 4y agoIn most of the world it is not illegal to use nazi symbolism.
- schleck8 4y agoI thought this was a moral discussion and not a legal one. What Cloudflare did was legal too.
- dmatech 4y agoBeing an edgelord or even a Nazi is totally legal in the USA. So is hosting violent imagery. These things might be against the TOS of major social media sites, but they're absolutely legal. That said, most people won't want to be around people who do this. Death threats are generally not legal, but ones that are obvious hyperbole might be. Natural language processing algorithms might be able to identify death threats automatically, but they struggle with hyperbole and sarcasm. But so do humans.
- schleck8 4y agoThis has been a moral discussion since the beginning, not a legal one.
- dmatech 4y agoYes, and people keep saying "amoral" like it's a bad thing. For instance, I want my power company to be amoral in customer selection. I want certainty that my power won't be cut because enough people demand it. And I don't want power cuts to be used as a form of social control [1]. Basically, society works best when people stay in their lanes or are at least allowed to stay in their lanes. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_control
- worldofmatthew 4y agoMore false equivalency. Facebook allowed the stream to be broadcast directly from the terrorist for 29 minutes. KiwiFarms simply hosted an archive to avoid it being memory holed. Context matters and attempts to avoid acknowledging context to create false equivalency is a big reason why most Twitter and Reddit arguments are so-toxic. Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting and would find the Nazi's rightfully abhorrent.
- alphabettsy 4y ago> Most (almost all in reality) of the Nazi symbolism is from people who are shit-posting Many people don’t have the luxury of assuming that people brandishing Nazi symbolism are shit-posting. For quite a few that symbolism represents an existential threat.
- Liquix 4y agoFree speech is free speech and must be protected at all costs, even if 99% of people think an idea is reprehensible. These people aren't going to shrug and walk away because a website goes down, they'll congregate somewhere else. The cycle will repeat. If folks aren't exposed to radical ideologies regularly - if everything they read on a screen is True and Safe - what happens when they stumble across a dark corner of the internet and are exposed for the first time? Censorship erodes our ability to critically evaluate, without actually stamping out the censored topic.
- ethanbond 4y agoI’m not pro censorship but you’re making a huge leap saying we need to be regularly exposed to radical ideologies in order to identify radical ideologies? Why would that be true? Frequent exposure to something normalizes that thing, it doesn’t make it stick out and be more identifiable.
- bobzimuta 4y agoThe best, recent example I have is Nick Fuentes. I'd only read from journo pieces making vague accusations (referencing other journo pieces) that he's a white nationalist, or seen clips of him trolling CPAC, so I've always been curious what he's actually about. Seeing a mainstream interview with Louis Theroux and debate livestream with Destiny quickly outs him as a white nationalist with an incoherent worldview. If the only way to hear his ideas, directly from his mouth, are on his platform in a dark corner of the internet you're only going to get his one-sided propaganda.
- krainboltgreene 4y agoI love that your conclusion is the only way to determine if someone is a nazi is if you've personally see that nazi platformed. Can't figure it out from the numerous things they've been quoted as saying, they gotta get in front of 5k people first.
- bobzimuta 4y ago
- junon 4y agoThere's a false equivalence you're missing. Facebook has billions of users. Kiwi farms, presumably, has several orders of magnitude less.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoFacebook earns like 100x as much money per user. They can afford to do much better.
- junon 4y agoYou can't throw money at the problem and just expect it work better. We should know this as an industry by now.
- worldofmatthew 4y agoIts far more easy than a forum that barely covers hosting costs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pseudo0 4y agoIsn't their point about the moderation response time when it comes to illegal material? It took Facebook 29 minutes to remove the Christchurch video, while this whole controversy appears to be focused on a post that was up for 14 minutes. User-generated content is a really hard problem, and we need to set reasonable best practices and guidelines. A small volunteer-run forum won't have 24/7 staff looking for illegal content or handling reports. KiwiFarms isn't a very sympathetic test case, but this example will be considered the precedent going forward for what Cloudflare should remove. If major tech companies can't meet this bar, how can we expect the shrinking hobbyist segment of the internet to manage?
- ethanbond 4y agoHere’s how: Don’t allow user generated content unless you can effectively moderate it. That should go for FB as well. We don’t need to start from the assumption that these services must or even should exist. If you can’t moderate, don’t build something that allows strangers to put information in front of millions of other strangers! Note that if you simply don’t want to moderate content (ie free speech absolutist), that’s a much different argument than you can’t do it effectively. If you want to and can’t do it, then don’t.
- yonaguska 4y agoThat's a great way to kill the best parts of the internet.
- ethanbond 4y agoReally? Which parts are those? Almost every service I enjoy is pretty effectively moderated, usually organically by the community. This is a consequence of service-level decisions. Things like ease of account creation, reputation, voting, some exogenous moderation, discovery dynamics, etc. are all levers a service has available. Which best parts are you referring to? One trap people fall into is thinking an edgy post here or there is a sign of no moderation. Seems more likely to me, given what moderation-free boards end up looking like, a few edgy posts here and there are a sign of extremely effective moderation.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago> ableist slurs Are you suggesting that Cloudflare should drop sites that don't censor the word "retard"? How about "moron" or "stupid"? There's a huge difference between insults and active shooters and it's strange to see them juxtaposed.
- sweetheart 4y agoJust because there is a huge difference doesn’t make using slurs innocent or harmless. If a site is host to the culture that is normalizing genuine hate (and that does seem to be the case!) I say CF should absolutely drop them.
- schleck8 4y agoNo, I did not suggest that. Read the big picture.
- dmix 4y agoNot yet at least. That's about step 3 or 4 down the road. It took Reddit a decade of constant pressure to get there for example. Like they say, can't tear down Rome in a day.
- selfmodruntime 4y ago> yes, we have plenty of long-standing accounts who frequently use the hard n-word and ableist slurs just for the sake of it, have hooked crosses and/or hitler in their profile picture and one of our administrators uses an antisemitic one with a stereotypical jew and money None of this is illegal. None of this warrants censorship. Twitter is not real. You can block traffic you don‘t like or log out. None of the above actively influences your life until you make the choice to let it.
- tsukikage 4y agoIt's also perfectly legal for a provider to decide they don't want to host such content.
- selfmodruntime 4y agoIt is also hypocritical to do so in the name of legal matters.
- dale_glass 4y agoIf that's the case, why would keeping the content be important? If it's "not real", then there's no real loss if the content is removed.