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The problem is that no automatic method we have now will catch context. There is a difference between "Jews were murdered by Germans during war" and "Jews destr

• peteradio 4y ago
  Provide services that force people to have skin in the game (non-anonymous and/or paid). Don't connect the whole goddamn world together, the world is not a melting pot. Let those in the network flag/block/defend/vouch so it aligns with whatever culture is on that particular network.
  • bwb 4y ago
    Maybe slight tweak to this "the world is a melting point, it just melts very slowly :)"
    • Bakary 4y ago
      The world is a lava lamp. The blobs coalesce and shift around but never for too long in the same spot.
• baud147258 4y ago
  > At the end, when Napoleon lost, remains of Polish military units were sent to Haiti to help France to maintain their colonies. Just a minor correction, the Polish were sent to Haiti in 1802, way before Napoleon had started losing.
  • philwelch 4y ago
    Yeah, Haiti broke away in a slave rebellion before Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States to raise money for the war effort so it wouldn’t make any sense for the Polish to be sent to Haiti at the end of the war.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war". I think the "reddit model" where you have smaller communities with community mods works much better than the Facebook or Twitter model where there's one "global community". Not that reddit's moderation is perfect or that you can 100% rely on community mods, but overall, it seems to work much better.
  • rat87 4y ago
    Reddit literally had /r/Holocaust controlled Nazis who would post Holocaust denial on it for years until reddit for too emberassed
  • nradov 4y ago
    The Reddit model allows paid foreign agents to become volunteer community (subreddit) moderators and then use that platform to sow division or push a biased narrative. How much do you think the Chinese government would pay to subtly emphasize or de-emphasize certain stories on a huge community like r/news or r/politics?
    • bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
      Ten cents.
  • RajT88 4y ago
    > Furthermore, you can publish "The effects of the Jewish population on the 1930s German economy" which can be either a genuine bona-fide analysis, or something which essentially boils down to "Jews destroyed German economy before the war". When I was in college, I was looking around an FTP server and found a holocaust denier book. So I read it. Well, more moderately skimmed (not lightly). It was exactly like this - it purported to be a sober view of history, well cited and no name calling. Literally none of the references were to anything real; it was all fabricated bullshit trying to push the reader to a particular conclusion (Jews are bad). Not being able to tell the difference is entirely the point. These bastards are sneaky.
• Juliate 4y ago
  The obvious legal response is/should be: don't make an algorithm take precedence if it is _that_ broken (incorrect, ineffective and unfair). Even from a product point of view, that's basic: your product feature doesn't pass quality, you don't ship it.
• shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Easy: stop moderating. Just allow everything.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    "Crime sure is hard to stop." "Well, just make everything legal."
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • neodymiumphish 4y ago
      What about only stopping (moderating) crime, then?
    • origin_path 4y ago
      Well, but that is literally one of the arguments for legalizing drugs. The issue here is more like defining what crime is, though, not stopping it. Stopping stuff on FB is easy. Figuring out what to stop, is hard. Figuring out if a disputed case should have been stopped is hard. For the 'real world' we have parliaments and courts, but there's FB has only the equivalent of police, not the other parts of the system. It is, in effect, a police state.
      • etchalon 4y ago
        Yes, some things are hard and impossible to get right 100% of the time.
    • kbelder 4y ago
      Allow legal things. Block illegal things. It seems crazy that it's impossible to find a major platform that has this policy.
      • rat87 4y ago
        Seems like a good way to may Facebook much much worse It's not hard to see why major platform has such a policy Also I don't want people to get blocked for pirating stuff. Or weed.
• Veserv 4y ago
  You are presupposing that for some reason Facebook must do this. If they can not moderate then their service is defective. The fact that they want to make huge gobs of money does not “force” them to offer a defective service, they can just not offer it. If a construction company said: “The only projects we can make a profit on are skyscrapers, but we do not know how to make a skyscraper without having it fall down and kill everybody in it.” They are not allowed to build skyscrapers no matter how important it is to their bottom line.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    > If they can not moderate then their service is defective Well wait a minute, couldn't you say the same about the ISPs that host websites in the first place? Isn't the standard pro-big-tech-censorship position "if you don't like it, make your own website"? If Facebook has to moderate content (according to any standard) in order to exists, why don't hosting providers also have to moderate? (FWIW I'm anti-censorship)
    • triceratops 4y ago
      Because Facebook and the hosting provider are at different levels of the networking stack?
      • Calvin02 4y ago
        I’m guessing that you didn’t hear about Cloudflare and Kiwi Farms? There is no stopping.
    • Veserv 4y ago
      I am responding to the article and the poster’s response in context. The article asserts that Facebook’s moderation is defective. The person I was responding to presented a standard generic argument that is of the form: “Yes, it is defective, but the problem is too hard for anybody to produce a non-defective solution. Therefore, the provider has no choice but to provide a defective service.” I am arguing that is untrue. If a service is defective, it can and should just not be offered. Note this is entirely contingent on the service being defective according to your value system. I have made no claim as to whether or not I agree with the specifics here, just that the generic conditional argument presented is flawed.
• philwelch 4y ago
  If anything you’re understating the problem. The problem with “Jews destroyed German economy before the war” is that it’s extremely vague and difficult to verify. There’s no good basis for the claim, but it’s not even a historical detail that could be easily verified; it’s more of an overarching theoretical opinion. As for “Jews were murdered by Germans during the war”, sure. That’s an extremely well documented fact. They were also murdered by Romanians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other collaborators, but in context, we know that the Germans were organizing the whole thing. We also know that there’s a different context today in 2022 where some people might want to emphasize and others might want to minimize the complicity of Ukrainian collaborators.
  • lurquer 4y ago
    >> As for “Jews were murdered by Germans during the war”, sure. That’s an extremely well documented fact. It’s sad that you’re blind to the fact that that statement is just as ‘racist’ and untrue as the original. Jews were not murdered by Germans. Rather, Some Jews were murderer by Some members of a political party that was primarily — but not exclusively — German. The overwhelming majority of Germans never murdered anyone.
    • end_of_line 4y ago
      Surely, nobody in Dachau knew what what have been happening in one of the very first nearby concentration camp on the daily basis. It originated few years before the second world war. Buchenwald, matthausen, gross rosen ( typical work camp but not less lethal than the concentration camp - it was German before 2 world War), all German, on the German soil constructed by the German people
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      You're attacking a strawman. Not only is a generous reading both entirely true and even compatible with your "corrections", the poster went on to add nuance such that it doesn't require any generosity whatsoever to read it that way.
• eqdw 4y ago
  > The problem is that no automatic method we have now will catch context. I disagree. The problem is that nobody is willing to be realistic about the limitations of automated moderation and proceed accordingly. If we can't create an automatic method that catches context, the solution isn't to bemoan that AI can't magically do what we want. The solution is to remove the rules that require AI to understand context in the first place, because it is fundamentally outside of our technical ability, and any attempt to achieve it will fail. The problem is people who think that context-based censorship is reasonable for a massive platform. It simply is not. It is reasonable at an individual level. It is reasonable at an interpersonal level. It's even reasonable at a small-group level, where specific individual human beings who are invested in the community can be aware of these context issues. It is not reasonable at Facebook scale, full stop. Facebook should not be in the business of deciding to ban things like this. That is a responsibility that belongs at a lower level. What does that look like in practice? If an individual posted it on their wall: * That individual uses their judgement and chooses to post it or not * The people who see it use their judgement and click the block button if they don't like it If an individual posted it in a small group: * The group can socially police such actions by commenting that they are upset by it * The group's administrators can privately reach out to the person who posted it, explain that they can't post such things in that group, explain why, and explain what actions they could take to remain in good graces * The group's administration can make a judgement call and remove the post, not on the basis of crude keyword detection, but on the basis of human understanding If an individual posted in a large group: * The large group can adopt clear and unambiguous rules that do not require context to administer, and enforce them accordingly on a case-by-case basis * The large group can pre-commit to not dealing with such issues, and require their members to deal with it privately, like human beings Trying to automate this process will always fail, and it will cause massive false-positive and false-negative issues as it does so. Engineers used to understand these concepts when I first entered industry 20 years ago. It's very disappointing to me that they either can't or won't now.
• kranke155 4y ago
  From my (very) limited understanding the Angolan Civil War had no good sides. It was a plain power struggle where two superpowers decided to invest their resources to deny the other a base in Africa. The local proxies were fine with this since they wanted nothing but to kill each other. The result was a bloodbath that went on for decades.
• logicalmonster 4y ago
  > I was reading quite a lot recently about war in Angola and still I have doubts which side was "good" and which was "bad", besides that people who lived there were hurt in the history like almost no other nation. Norm MacDonald (I didn't even know he was sick) is said to have made the following quote, which is an interesting filter to look at all you know about history through. "It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?" > will not be recognized by any machine we have nowadays. The first is true, the second is bullshit, how algorithm can now this? Forget algorithms for a second, even humans can't adequately judge nuanced issues, particularly issues that they're unfamiliar with and lack the context around, and particularly with a definitive time limit to work against. Now think about how social media giants operate. They have teams all over the world, say in Bangalore, trying to judge the nuanced political arguments of foreigners having discussions about their own country's history that they don't know intimately. Oh, and they probably have to judge most issues in less than 30 seconds or they'll be too slow to keep their job. It's like asking an average American to intelligently weigh in on some complicated political argument around Kashmir with a few seconds to read a post and decide who's claim is right. It's absolutely ridiculous that this is the moderation standard that exists.
  • triceratops 4y ago
    > It says here in this history book that; luckily, the good guys have won every single time. Is that really true? The conquest of the Americas is near-universally seen as "evil" defeating at least "innocent" if not "good". Leaving aside the people who say "The Aztecs had it coming". The Roman empire did some pretty shitty things, that most people would recognize as evil (slavery, Celtic genocide) but is still regarded warmly today as the ancestor of modern Western society, morality, and culture. That counts as a "win".
    • troon-lover 4y ago
    • logicalmonster 4y ago
      > Is that really true? That's sort of the joke. It's another way of saying "the victors write the history books"
• htrp 4y ago
  Compositionality issues in AI
• swayvil 4y ago
  It's gotta be crowdsourced. Like reddit/hn voting. But smarter. Like voting weights the value of peer's votes and such. I think it's the only way. Otoh, the true Lord of the Flies might emerge that way. Maybe democracy is inherently flawed. I dunno. Experiments are called for. How do we test social media designs?
  • coredog64 4y ago
    Slashdot used random moderation (and meta-moderation) and I feel like that worked out pretty well. If I didn’t want to see goatse, I could set browsing to +2 and not have to worry.