8 ms·
I was just talking to an author who published an ad on Facebook for their sci fi book. They had the word "beat" in the ad. The FB algo said that words intills p
by bwb 4y ago
I was just talking to an author who published an ad on Facebook for their sci fi book. They had the word "beat" in the ad. The FB algo said that words intills people to violence, banned her account for 2 months, and kept all the ad money.
Funny enough, her book is about the dangers of an algorithm-based AI supersystem...
Facebook is the worst.
- petre 4y agoBy the same twisted logic, the Beat Generation instills people to violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation
- WesolyKubeczek 4y agoWhat about the Beatles?!
- marginalia_nu 4y agoBeat less? Seems to promote peace.
- thriftwy 4y agoHow come they get to keep money for the service not provided? Should be strictly illegal.
- wodenokoto 4y agoIt probably is, but not all jurisdictions have a small claims court and even those that do, it can be quite cumbersome compared to the lost money
- kelnos 4y agoAnd if you do it, Facebook will probably retaliate by permanently closing your account.
- sgjohnson 4y agoI'd really like to see this. And after that I'd like to see a jury hit Facebook with 12 figures in punitive damages in a class action case.
- quickthrower2 4y agoDoesn't FB have the right to not do business with you? What is the basis for the suit? Anyway I do remember FB's "a cool "open source" way to do front-end development, feel "free" to use it, you can't sue us though". So maybe there is some shitty clause like that when you sign up.
- sgjohnson 4y ago> What is the basis for the suit? Withholding your money and then when you (rightfully) sue them for that, retaliating and kicking you off the platform entirely?
- hoppla 4y agoWas it not a clause in the react js or so, that you lose the right to use the framework if you sued Facebook?
- sgjohnson 4y agoReact is MIT licensed, so no.
- cranium 4y agoIt's fearsome how they filter such words without looking at the context or giving the benefit of the doubt. Now, you have to proactively reword your ideas to make them fit the invisible mold. How has newspeak been going for the public discourse ?
- i_like_apis 4y agoDouble thumbs up good.
- icare_1er 4y ago
- mrpopo 4y agoNo, this is the result of the laziness of social networks to look for automated solutions to solve at-scale (read: at the lowest cost) problems of their own making. More generally this is the result of giving free rein on global discourse to unregulated companies, who ultimately took full advantage and profiteed off of it.
- icare_1er 4y ago
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoRemoving incitements to violence seems like a good thing, and I would guess their customers (the advertisers) fully support it. The fact that they do it so badly is entirely on them.
- icare_1er 4y ago
- michaelmrose 4y agoYou needn't read or analyze everything just the stuff that is reported and since 90% of the problem is 1% of individuals if you can keep the same old folks from coming back you will ultimately have less to process. The logical thing is that the kind of human moderation that they actually needs costs money and you acquire said funds by charging monthly. This has the side effect of making it easy to permanently ban problem children via their address and or method of payment. One need not take prepaid cards either.
- Bakary 4y ago
- protomolecule 4y agoAlgorithm-based AI supersystem proactively defends itself.
- Kiro 4y agoWhat was the full sentence? I've marketed a lot of games on Facebook with much worse words (kill etc) and never had a problem. Also, kept money how? Facebook charges you in arrears.
- math-dev 4y agoUnfortunately on the internet the onus is on the defendant to prove innocence. I hardly buy the top comment as true but everyone eats it up here since it goes with their narrative
- bwb 4y agoSerious? It is entirely true, why would I share that otherwise? I've been on HN for a long time, see my background :) Your account is totally blank and joined in 2021. You also submitted an article about rethinking app development at FB. In a comment you also post you work for a large company. Do you work for Facebook?
- math-dev 4y agoI don’t work at facebook but based on your response I am more likely to believe you now. Sorry if it caused any angst, wasn’t intended. However doesn’t change the fact that a lot of things get accepted at face value if they align with what someone’s view of things is
- bwb 4y agoNo worries, I just was kinda stunned you would imply I had any motive to not share something accurate. It was a convo I had this morning with an author who is a friend. (It it is just one piece of data, and people are good at finding data that supports their viewpoint of course. Given all the scandals FB is under and problems on this thread, I do think it supports a narrative of FB having massive problems around ethics and moral actions.) Here is a fun story :) I have an ad account at FB for a company I closed in early 2020 due to Covid. I wanted to delete the account, but FB makes it impossible to do that. I message their support and they tell me they can remove it, but they need my ID and a handwritten letter. I am stunned. A handwritten letter??? How does that achieve anything :) So I write out a short note with a bit of snark about a tech company needing a handwritten letter, take a picture and send it to their support chat/ticket along with my ID. They do not like that I was snarky and refuse to do anything, even after I remove some of my snark and resend it. Thus, I still have the account and 14 support replies later they still refuse to help me. (note, they didn't want a letter send to them via the post office, they literally wanted me to write it and send it to them. So weird...)
- herbst 4y agoI realize this was a weird time and masks have been a complicated topic. However: I advertised some masks my grandma has sewn on FB. It was ok, expansive clicks like always but ok. This was running for at least a week or two. But when I changed some text it triggered a new ad review and within no hour my account was banned. It didn't even took a hour to deny my appeal as well and my account was lost forever (without ever naming any reason) This account had 50+ (harmless) groups with way over 100k followers as well as a few thousand dollars in ad spend just that year. I didn't socialize at all on Facebook which I guess made my account fishy to some degree but all data was correct and passport verified. This is the reason I completely ignore Facebook and all its platforms for whatever reason these days. I don't care if it could help my business, it's not worth the trouble.
- ls15 4y ago> This is the reason I completely ignore Facebook and all its platforms for whatever reason these days. I don't care if it could help my business, it's not worth the trouble. That's basically my stance since 2004 when I first heard about them. I lost some opportunities, I guess, but it also allowed me to tell everyone how I feel about data privacy while keeping a straight face.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 4y ago> it also allowed me to tell everyone how I feel about data privacy while keeping a straight face. Same here. I not only don't condemn people for using Facebook, I almost always defend their use of Facebook. But since I mean what I say when I'm talking about the site, I haven't had an account in at least a decade and I block the domains. I dislike the site, not its users.
- criddell 4y agoDid you ever consider starting the arbitration process with Facebook?
- prepend 4y agoThe weirdest is the email message says they reviewed and upheld. Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time? Do they lie about the review? Is the reviewer so out of touch they don’t recognize real violence vs just the use of “beat?”
- Tao3300 4y agoThe human review is probably someone who doesn't understand the language verifying that a word is present for fractional cents on Mechanical Turk or something.
- michaelmrose 4y agoIt could well be that they are paid very little, the majority of reports are true positives, have a quota to make, and expect no consequence for false positives. If its outsourced they may have a bad grasp of the language as well.
- z9znz 4y ago> no consequence for false positives This could be the key point. Penalties for letting something bad slip past, but no penalties for falsely flagging. It’s a pragmatic solution, but it is almost by definition inhuman.
- lvxferre 4y ago>Is the review not human? Do they run it through the same algorithm a second time? Do they lie about the review? Yes, yes, and yes. There's a context-illiterate AI deciding what you can say or not, even if the later heavily depends on context. And just like it'll trigger a bazillion of false positives, it'll also trigger a bazillion of false negatives; someone can easily spread hate through Facebook, unimpeded, by simply encoding language in a way that the algorithm doesn't understand, but humans do; or with simple irony.
- z9znz 4y agoI think the algorithms are just minimum standard efforts which provide enough plausible deniability for FB to be able to argue that they provide safeguards on bad content.
- ahallock 4y agoBeats by Dre must have a difficult time.
- ZiiS 4y agoThey may well have meant that "beat"; given Apple's push back on their tracking.
- bhedgeoser 4y ago> Funny enough, her book is about the dangers of an algorithm-based AI supersystem... Skynet is here.
- knightofmars 4y agoThis reminds me of the short story "Computers Don't Argue" by Gordon D Dickson. The format is a series of correspondence between individuals regarding a book. The plot starts with a man attempting to deal with the situation of having been mailed the wrong book by an online retailer. It then proceeds to take a turn into the dark. https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133 https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
- knodi123 4y agoYeesh, that's horrifying. Written 1965?!?!? Prophetic. I once had a similar deal when I lived in a house with several guys for a year in college. We divvied up the utilities, and I was in charge of the phone bill. I set up automatic payment, and never had a problem. But 5 years later, the phone company accused me of skipping my June payment, and carefully deducting that amount from the "total owed" amount in every subsequent month. It's insane, and every human I spoke to agreed with me, but no one had the power to do anything about it. I could either travel cross country to go to court, with no evidence other than common sense, or just pay the $30 bill plus another $40 in penalties.
- protomolecule 4y agoWould you share the link to the book? Genuinely interested in reading
- bwb 4y agoYep, it is 5 Stars by Louise Blackwick: https://www.amazon.com/5-Stars-Louise-Blackwick-ebook/dp/B09MRC6HGR https://www.amazon.com/5-Stars-Louise-Blackwick-ebook/dp/B09... Really cool author out of the Netherlands, I highly recommend the book. It is dark sci fi, and she calls it "Neon Science Fiction". Which sums the story up nicely (dark and gritty with a flippant attitude) I believe the line she got hit with was "Can You Beat The Neon God's Algorithm?" She also did a list on my site about books that inspired her creation of neon science fiction (and how she defines that): https://shepherd.com/best-books/inspired-neon-science-fiction https://shepherd.com/best-books/inspired-neon-science-fictio... Let me know what you think if you read it! There was one scene in the book I can't get out of my head... ever...
- protomolecule 4y agoThanks, I'll give it a try. Interesting site, btw.
- bwb 4y agothanks, it's a really fun project! I launched it on HN in April 2021 :) All the topics are hooked into Wikidata on the ML side, eventually I want to build knowledge graphs using the Wikidata info and play with historical timelines etc and see what I can do... I am working on adding individual book pages and then genres and age group data is next.
- Covzire 4y agoPersonally I think Zuckerberg might be a sociopath.
- scarmig 4y agoI don't know anything at all about FB advertising, but is there any way someone could use canary accounts to rollout an ad to prevent this? I.e. start with a small ad buy in a low follower/whatever account, wait 24 hours for it to be flagged, and if it doesn't trigger any reviews, roll it out to the main/real account? Not that that's practical for a mom and pop shop.
- erehweb 4y agoSounds like a good way for canary and main to get banned for some policy violation.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIf they report that money as advertising revenue, wouldn't FB be committing securities fraud?