8 ms·

Facebook claims people showing art, electronics, wheelchair mods is hate speech

111 points by ptorrone 3y ago

Georgelemental 3y ago
It appears that they may be reaping what they have sown: https://facebook.com/adafruitindustries/photos/pb.67836792577.-2207520000../10158729541297578/?wtsid=rdr_0cbZspxoUJ7QGiXiZ https://facebook.com/adafruitindustries/photos/pb.6783679257... When you give megacorporations unnacountable power to censor speech, that power will be abused.
incomingpain 3y ago
Facebook isn't who censored adafruit. Obviously you realize 'hate speech' isn't true at all, yet here we are. 34 minutes long, so near impossible to figure out what exactly is the objectionable material but you clearly hit a US government list. They for some reason don't want you to publish this video. What some people do is cut down this video into 11 videos and then post them 1 at a time and see which one the US government doesn't want you to publish.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
This is why the centralization of all social interaction on a few big platforms is a cause for concern. Some of the blame lies with people too; ideally, companies such as Adafruit would simply run a Discourse instance (or another forum software), and have users communicate there and receive web push notifications, and so on, instead of just using a large social platform. As for Facebook, there are no disincentives for over-moderation. After all, it is better to over-censor and avoid attracting negative news coverage, the attention of legislators, and negative sentiments among people.
- scrame 3y ago
  a discord instance is just shifting to another central platform, albeit more permissive for now.
  - haunter 3y ago
    They wrote Discourse not Discord, two different and unrelated things https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse
    - scrame 3y ago
      wow, my mistake. i even saw discourse and am so used to seeing everything move to discord that I think my brain just autocorrected it.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Discourse itself is GPL, which means that even they shouldn't be able to revoke your license to the code.
      - eastbound 3y ago
        Next headline: GPL considered harmful, enables hate speech, favors extremist websites. I’m joking but GitHub was extremely woke in the two years before the acquisition. Banning open-source and making everything cloud-dependent would be a great way to ensure no ungodly website is run freely.
        bombcar 3y ago
        esr or rms or someone had a good essay on why “use for good not evil” license clauses (banning use by militaries was a favorite) werent a great idea for free software.
    - zelphirkalt 3y ago
      Still does not make it less centralized though. If the majority of people is on that one instance of terrible forum, and you get banned, you are still going to have a hard time participating. And just like with other social media, you could of course host your own thing. But with that come content moderation obligations, if open to the public. A lot of work to create a parallel service.
- echelon 3y ago
  Until we have protocols over platforms, we need to compel lawmakers to treat platforms over some threshold (perhaps 250M MAUs?) as "common carriers". While platforms should be able to deboost or delete hate speech and harassment, there need to be robust escape hatches for when content is falsely flagged or when users return to normal community behavior. Nobody should be able to be de-platformed (or de-personed) indefinitely. I routinely see folks on Reddit that complain of being blocked in some subreddit they enjoy because they merely posted in another subreddit once. Perhaps even in disagreement with the content of that subreddit. There's no appeal process or restitution, and Reddit's ban evasion policies state that trying to get around these bans can get you completely perma banned. Imagine permanently not being able to participate in the biggest community for your {hobby, city, career}. And being told you must comply. That's messed up. Even if regulation-compliant moderation winds up costing an order of magnitude more than it does today, it will be well worth it to preserve our freedoms. Those that are pro-censorship and pro-user removal should realize that they could just as easily find themselves on the other side of the debate. A decade ago the dynamics favored the other side, and those now in power would be the ones finding themselves erased. The pendulum swings. It's best to make rules that protect everyone, especially the minority. Censorship and permabanning are 1984, regardless of what the opinions or who the users are.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    It’s fascinating to me that you’re being downvoted for giving such a level headed opinion.
  - api 3y ago
    Protocols over platforms hasn’t happened because who is going to pay for the apps and polishing their user experience? Software is really weird. For a car the engine and drive train and frame cost a lot more than the dashboard and the trim. For software this is backwards. The engine and drive train are often cheap or even free, but controls that people can use or trim to make it look nice is very difficult and expensive. It’s easy to make (most) software work but soul crushingly hard to make it usable.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Here's the solution, if you'd like to use it: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
  - ShroudedNight 3y ago
    Based on your own copy, Dreamwidth checks the boxes at least as effectively as your own offerings. "The" is bearing so much load here, we might as well be making jokes about jet fuel combustion and steel beams.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      Where is Dreamwidth mentioned in our copy? Why specifically it? Seems to me that no other platform comes close to replicating most of the features of Facebook.
      - ShroudedNight 3y ago
        Dreamwidth is not mentioned anywhere in your copy. What your copy does provide are your criteria for what the "next big thing" is. You asserted that your offering was the exclusive solution to the problem. Dreamwidth is merely my proof by counter-example.
        EGreg 3y ago
        I am not sure it's much of a counterexample. Is Dreamwidth a decentralized replacement for Facebook that people can use? Does it replace most of Facebook's features?
        r721 3y ago
        Dreamwidth is a Livejournal fork, a blogging service.
        EGreg 3y ago
- usernew 3y ago
  There is no centralization. There are many different websites to use to socialize, and not to long ago we didn't have any social websites and we still had plenty of social interaction - I'd say even more than now depending on if you count random garbage from anonymous strangers "social interaction." I do not, nor have I ever even been on facebook or twitter. The reason she might have gotten flagged is because of stuff like this - where either her or a person of the same name says things facebook might not like to host. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/20/new-israeli-pullback-unsettles-settlement/52d5447b-105d-438e-9e58-12295e8f6287/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/20/n... "But in Negohot, a settlement of religious nationalists, no one is buying the government line. Virtually everyone here dislikes the peace process and deeply distrusts the Palestinians. "At the end of all this, the Jewish people will live in a high tower and the Palestinians will have all the land and big private houses," said Limor Fried .. "These two people are fighting for the same land and the same places, so there's no chance for peace." If that's not the same person as the Adafruit lady, and they just share a name - well not a problem. There's a way to dispute the facebook autoban - it tells you right in the original message. There's no issue here. Let's not create one. No one needs facebook, no one cares, don't make up problems just to get angry and have something to solve. While we're at it, let's stop having news articles and news on TV about random crap someone anonymously tweeted from the toilet on their phone.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    You’re pulling a story (about a regional dispute) from 20+ years ago as proof that Facebook was correct to block this one video about art? How are you making this connection? Facebook has no problem with Israel’s existence, I’m not sure what your problem with Jews existing is, but this is a very odd place to make a political argument.
  - sledgehammers 3y ago
    What the hell are you talking about? There is massive centralization.
- extra88 3y ago
  Adafruit does run its own forum but this is about live-streamed video that is also stored for on-demand viewing. And as the post mentions, the video in question is not gone, they do the stream on multiple platforms simultaneously, for instance it's still on YouTube. They do this not only because of the expense of operating your own video hosting infrastructure but also to be where their audience is, which is in multiple places.
indy 3y ago
The entire concept of "hate speech" should be thrown away.
- thr-nrg 3y ago
  [dead]
- nme01 3y ago
  There was always some concept like this to shut people’s mouth (both for good and bad reasons). Throughout the ages it was called many names: taboo, blasphemy etc.
  - detrites 3y ago
    That's an interesting insight. Indeed, the proponents of what may be modern-day equivalents, seem also to have superstition or religious-like beliefs when it comes to these topics. Also can be as hard to reason with.
- unpopular42 3y ago
  Wait, if we did that, how would we silence people we disagree with?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  It goes deeper even than that. I don't know if my childhood was typical, but for me the concept of hatred itself is narrow. Isn't it supposed to be an emotion that's especially visceral? If a person feels hatred, if they hate someone or something, shouldn't we see their jaws clench, shouldn't their blood pressure go up? Won't it be difficult for them to form coherent sentences, and so on? But today, "hate" is any time you say something someone dislikes or the politics of which they disagree with. It's nearly a meaningless word now. The entire concept of "hate" might be worth discarding.
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    Hate (like love) is not an emotion, but an act of will.
thr-nrg 3y ago
[dead]
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
Text recognition that first frame and you'd likely get "TO HELL".
- ddtaylor 3y ago
  A very stupid dystopia
prvc 3y ago
The revolution eats its children.
lfconsult 3y ago
Just leave thoose platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc...). Really... If no users, no ads, no money then the platform disappear... And voilà! If a trusted and trustfull post from Adafruit is not allowed to be public, imagine what can be "censored" too.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Saying "just leave" leads to a problem similar to the prisoner's dilemma: if everyone left Facebook, everyone would be better off for it, but if just you leave Facebook and everyone else stays on, you're way worse off.
  - lfconsult 3y ago
    Really interesting toughts, thanks for sharing. You're right, around me anybody has left Facebook except me. Do I feel worse about that, not at all.
gorgoiler 3y ago
Any content where it looks like you are holding a gun to your head can be flagged. Power drills and hairdryers are close enough to do it and that kind of makes sense — both those objects can really hurt you if you push them up against your temples. What seems to be missing though is the basic Bayesian statistics to go from finding a few instances of things that might look like self harm, to determining the whole video is about self harm. It feels like the equivalent of millions of dollars of speech recognition being able to pick out individual voices, accents, and languages, only to then make final decision by string matching a list of known obscenities to the transcript thereby banning all videos about Scunthorpe.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  I'd rather have 100 videos where it actually looks like people are pointing guns at their heads go unflagged than 1 video of someone using a hair dryer being wrongly flagged.
omgmajk 3y ago
I often get stunned over how wrong facebook's algorithms constantly are. I get that they try out things a lot and it results in some weird stuff happening but facebook is overall the worst from my point of view.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

111 points by ptorrone 3y ago

It appears that they may be reaping what they have sown: https://facebook.com/adafruitindustries/photos/pb.67836792577.-2207520000../10158729541297578/?wtsid=rdr_0cbZspxoUJ7QGiXiZ https://facebook.com/adafruitindustries/photos/pb.6783679257... When you give megacorporations unnacountable power to censor speech, that power will be abused.

incomingpain 3y ago

Facebook isn't who censored adafruit. Obviously you realize 'hate speech' isn't true at all, yet here we are. 34 minutes long, so near impossible to figure out what exactly is the objectionable material but you clearly hit a US government list. They for some reason don't want you to publish this video. What some people do is cut down this video into 11 videos and then post them 1 at a time and see which one the US government doesn't want you to publish.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

This is why the centralization of all social interaction on a few big platforms is a cause for concern. Some of the blame lies with people too; ideally, companies such as Adafruit would simply run a Discourse instance (or another forum software), and have users communicate there and receive web push notifications, and so on, instead of just using a large social platform. As for Facebook, there are no disincentives for over-moderation. After all, it is better to over-censor and avoid attracting negative news coverage, the attention of legislators, and negative sentiments among people.

scrame 3y ago
a discord instance is just shifting to another central platform, albeit more permissive for now.
- haunter 3y ago
  They wrote Discourse not Discord, two different and unrelated things https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse
  - scrame 3y ago
    wow, my mistake. i even saw discourse and am so used to seeing everything move to discord that I think my brain just autocorrected it.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Discourse itself is GPL, which means that even they shouldn't be able to revoke your license to the code.
    - eastbound 3y ago
      Next headline: GPL considered harmful, enables hate speech, favors extremist websites. I’m joking but GitHub was extremely woke in the two years before the acquisition. Banning open-source and making everything cloud-dependent would be a great way to ensure no ungodly website is run freely.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        esr or rms or someone had a good essay on why “use for good not evil” license clauses (banning use by militaries was a favorite) werent a great idea for free software.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Still does not make it less centralized though. If the majority of people is on that one instance of terrible forum, and you get banned, you are still going to have a hard time participating. And just like with other social media, you could of course host your own thing. But with that come content moderation obligations, if open to the public. A lot of work to create a parallel service.
echelon 3y ago
Until we have protocols over platforms, we need to compel lawmakers to treat platforms over some threshold (perhaps 250M MAUs?) as "common carriers". While platforms should be able to deboost or delete hate speech and harassment, there need to be robust escape hatches for when content is falsely flagged or when users return to normal community behavior. Nobody should be able to be de-platformed (or de-personed) indefinitely. I routinely see folks on Reddit that complain of being blocked in some subreddit they enjoy because they merely posted in another subreddit once. Perhaps even in disagreement with the content of that subreddit. There's no appeal process or restitution, and Reddit's ban evasion policies state that trying to get around these bans can get you completely perma banned. Imagine permanently not being able to participate in the biggest community for your {hobby, city, career}. And being told you must comply. That's messed up. Even if regulation-compliant moderation winds up costing an order of magnitude more than it does today, it will be well worth it to preserve our freedoms. Those that are pro-censorship and pro-user removal should realize that they could just as easily find themselves on the other side of the debate. A decade ago the dynamics favored the other side, and those now in power would be the ones finding themselves erased. The pendulum swings. It's best to make rules that protect everyone, especially the minority. Censorship and permabanning are 1984, regardless of what the opinions or who the users are.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  It’s fascinating to me that you’re being downvoted for giving such a level headed opinion.
- api 3y ago
  Protocols over platforms hasn’t happened because who is going to pay for the apps and polishing their user experience? Software is really weird. For a car the engine and drive train and frame cost a lot more than the dashboard and the trim. For software this is backwards. The engine and drive train are often cheap or even free, but controls that people can use or trim to make it look nice is very difficult and expensive. It’s easy to make (most) software work but soul crushingly hard to make it usable.
EGreg 3y ago
Here's the solution, if you'd like to use it: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
- ShroudedNight 3y ago
  Based on your own copy, Dreamwidth checks the boxes at least as effectively as your own offerings. "The" is bearing so much load here, we might as well be making jokes about jet fuel combustion and steel beams.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Where is Dreamwidth mentioned in our copy? Why specifically it? Seems to me that no other platform comes close to replicating most of the features of Facebook.
    - ShroudedNight 3y ago
      Dreamwidth is not mentioned anywhere in your copy. What your copy does provide are your criteria for what the "next big thing" is. You asserted that your offering was the exclusive solution to the problem. Dreamwidth is merely my proof by counter-example.
      - EGreg 3y ago
        I am not sure it's much of a counterexample. Is Dreamwidth a decentralized replacement for Facebook that people can use? Does it replace most of Facebook's features?
        r721 3y ago
        Dreamwidth is a Livejournal fork, a blogging service.
        EGreg 3y ago
usernew 3y ago
There is no centralization. There are many different websites to use to socialize, and not to long ago we didn't have any social websites and we still had plenty of social interaction - I'd say even more than now depending on if you count random garbage from anonymous strangers "social interaction." I do not, nor have I ever even been on facebook or twitter. The reason she might have gotten flagged is because of stuff like this - where either her or a person of the same name says things facebook might not like to host. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/20/new-israeli-pullback-unsettles-settlement/52d5447b-105d-438e-9e58-12295e8f6287/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/20/n... "But in Negohot, a settlement of religious nationalists, no one is buying the government line. Virtually everyone here dislikes the peace process and deeply distrusts the Palestinians. "At the end of all this, the Jewish people will live in a high tower and the Palestinians will have all the land and big private houses," said Limor Fried .. "These two people are fighting for the same land and the same places, so there's no chance for peace." If that's not the same person as the Adafruit lady, and they just share a name - well not a problem. There's a way to dispute the facebook autoban - it tells you right in the original message. There's no issue here. Let's not create one. No one needs facebook, no one cares, don't make up problems just to get angry and have something to solve. While we're at it, let's stop having news articles and news on TV about random crap someone anonymously tweeted from the toilet on their phone.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  You’re pulling a story (about a regional dispute) from 20+ years ago as proof that Facebook was correct to block this one video about art? How are you making this connection? Facebook has no problem with Israel’s existence, I’m not sure what your problem with Jews existing is, but this is a very odd place to make a political argument.
- sledgehammers 3y ago
  What the hell are you talking about? There is massive centralization.
extra88 3y ago
Adafruit does run its own forum but this is about live-streamed video that is also stored for on-demand viewing. And as the post mentions, the video in question is not gone, they do the stream on multiple platforms simultaneously, for instance it's still on YouTube. They do this not only because of the expense of operating your own video hosting infrastructure but also to be where their audience is, which is in multiple places.

indy 3y ago

The entire concept of "hate speech" should be thrown away.

thr-nrg 3y ago
[dead]
nme01 3y ago
There was always some concept like this to shut people’s mouth (both for good and bad reasons). Throughout the ages it was called many names: taboo, blasphemy etc.
- detrites 3y ago
  That's an interesting insight. Indeed, the proponents of what may be modern-day equivalents, seem also to have superstition or religious-like beliefs when it comes to these topics. Also can be as hard to reason with.
unpopular42 3y ago
Wait, if we did that, how would we silence people we disagree with?
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
It goes deeper even than that. I don't know if my childhood was typical, but for me the concept of hatred itself is narrow. Isn't it supposed to be an emotion that's especially visceral? If a person feels hatred, if they hate someone or something, shouldn't we see their jaws clench, shouldn't their blood pressure go up? Won't it be difficult for them to form coherent sentences, and so on? But today, "hate" is any time you say something someone dislikes or the politics of which they disagree with. It's nearly a meaningless word now. The entire concept of "hate" might be worth discarding.
- mbork_pl 3y ago
  Hate (like love) is not an emotion, but an act of will.

thr-nrg 3y ago

[dead]

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago

Text recognition that first frame and you'd likely get "TO HELL".

ddtaylor 3y ago
A very stupid dystopia

prvc 3y ago

The revolution eats its children.

lfconsult 3y ago

Just leave thoose platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc...). Really... If no users, no ads, no money then the platform disappear... And voilà! If a trusted and trustfull post from Adafruit is not allowed to be public, imagine what can be "censored" too.

josephcsible 3y ago
Saying "just leave" leads to a problem similar to the prisoner's dilemma: if everyone left Facebook, everyone would be better off for it, but if just you leave Facebook and everyone else stays on, you're way worse off.
- lfconsult 3y ago
  Really interesting toughts, thanks for sharing. You're right, around me anybody has left Facebook except me. Do I feel worse about that, not at all.

gorgoiler 3y ago

Any content where it looks like you are holding a gun to your head can be flagged. Power drills and hairdryers are close enough to do it and that kind of makes sense — both those objects can really hurt you if you push them up against your temples. What seems to be missing though is the basic Bayesian statistics to go from finding a few instances of things that might look like self harm, to determining the whole video is about self harm. It feels like the equivalent of millions of dollars of speech recognition being able to pick out individual voices, accents, and languages, only to then make final decision by string matching a list of known obscenities to the transcript thereby banning all videos about Scunthorpe.

josephcsible 3y ago
I'd rather have 100 videos where it actually looks like people are pointing guns at their heads go unflagged than 1 video of someone using a hair dryer being wrongly flagged.

omgmajk 3y ago

I often get stunned over how wrong facebook's algorithms constantly are. I get that they try out things a lot and it results in some weird stuff happening but facebook is overall the worst from my point of view.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]