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So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose the latter, just as what we ca

by arczyx 3y ago

So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose the latter, just as what we can expect from big corporations nowadays. Not an unexpected decision overall, but it did surprise me how low Facebook can stoop. Like, they didn't even bother to fix their stuff in Myanmar after all these years with Myanmar being the poster child of their hate speech problem! > In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta’s operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate speech aimed at the Rohingya—actual posts from the period of the genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings I’ve been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-language Facebook advertisements. > Meta accepted all eight ads.

cm2012 3y ago
I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar was in a civil war at all. (Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this).
- arczyx 3y ago
  > At worst its negligence According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed" is more appropriate. > Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and “foreign adversaries.”
  - cm2012 3y ago
    That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Then they shouldn't operate there if they can't do so without their users being harmed as a result
      - paulddraper 3y ago
        Like, block IP addresses?
        AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        Seems like a good start
        amerkhalid 3y ago
        Prevent creating accounts in countries they cannot operate responsibly. Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate.
        bobsmooth 3y ago
        >Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate. I promise you if they tried that people would complain even harder.
        paulddraper 3y ago
        HN is never happy
    - taway1237 3y ago
      Maybe they should consider not operating in countries where they unmonitored presence may lead to genocide? There's no obligation to operate everywhere. Instead, as discussed in previous parts, they invested heavily to get a monopoly in third world countries.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Purposely ignoring a problem is negligence.
- duped 3y ago
  > I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. They did certainly care about the growth of daily active users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
  - blululu 3y ago
    User growth and profits are not the same thing. A company as big as Facebook is going to have different groups with different objectives that often do not see eye to eye or even know about each other. A company as profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are motivated by things other than profits. There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to get as many users as possible in developing markets. These markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook will never disclose its cost per user but in general online ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the most optimistic development projections will not make them profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from Myanmar is negligible. Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally get the sense that people there (especially at the top) have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their product makes the world a better place (I disagree with this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that these the project tasked with increasing users in developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than business.
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  > Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this Part II of this series addresses this stat. During the peak genocidal years it seems there were only a handful of mods assigned to Myanmar, and none of them lived in Myanmar. To this day it sounds like there still may not be more than a hundred people moderating Myanmar content. Which is inline with the 20K number: 195 countries * 100 moderators per country = 19.5K mods total I guess my main idea here is that when I look at the back-of-envelope numbers it's easy to see how even 100 moderators would have trouble keeping up with the content that millions of people produce. So you really do need those automated moderation tools to be effective. Can someone please continue the thought experiment by estimating how much content each mod can review in a day, then extrapolating up to a week or month, and comparing to an estimate of how much content was actually posted on Facebook in the similar timeframe? I believe Part I or II provides an estimate like that.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Why "nowadays" ? In which century did big corporations behave responsibly ? Of course Facebook didn't fix anything in Myanmar - the new junta government is both the one running the troll farms and responsible for the previous genocide !

by arczyx 3y ago

cm2012 3y ago

I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar was in a civil war at all. (Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this).

arczyx 3y ago
> At worst its negligence According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed" is more appropriate. > Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and “foreign adversaries.”
- cm2012 3y ago
  That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all their workers. its not reasonable.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Then they shouldn't operate there if they can't do so without their users being harmed as a result
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Like, block IP addresses?
      - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        Seems like a good start
      - amerkhalid 3y ago
        Prevent creating accounts in countries they cannot operate responsibly. Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate.
        bobsmooth 3y ago
        >Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate. I promise you if they tried that people would complain even harder.
        paulddraper 3y ago
        HN is never happy
  - taway1237 3y ago
    Maybe they should consider not operating in countries where they unmonitored presence may lead to genocide? There's no obligation to operate everywhere. Instead, as discussed in previous parts, they invested heavily to get a monopoly in third world countries.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Purposely ignoring a problem is negligence.
duped 3y ago
> I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its getting from Myanmar per year. They did certainly care about the growth of daily active users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
- blululu 3y ago
  User growth and profits are not the same thing. A company as big as Facebook is going to have different groups with different objectives that often do not see eye to eye or even know about each other. A company as profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are motivated by things other than profits. There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to get as many users as possible in developing markets. These markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook will never disclose its cost per user but in general online ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the most optimistic development projections will not make them profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from Myanmar is negligible. Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally get the sense that people there (especially at the top) have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their product makes the world a better place (I disagree with this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that these the project tasked with increasing users in developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than business.
kaycebasques 3y ago
> Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this Part II of this series addresses this stat. During the peak genocidal years it seems there were only a handful of mods assigned to Myanmar, and none of them lived in Myanmar. To this day it sounds like there still may not be more than a hundred people moderating Myanmar content. Which is inline with the 20K number: 195 countries * 100 moderators per country = 19.5K mods total I guess my main idea here is that when I look at the back-of-envelope numbers it's easy to see how even 100 moderators would have trouble keeping up with the content that millions of people produce. So you really do need those automated moderation tools to be effective. Can someone please continue the thought experiment by estimating how much content each mod can review in a day, then extrapolating up to a week or month, and comparing to an estimate of how much content was actually posted on Facebook in the similar timeframe? I believe Part I or II provides an estimate like that.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Why "nowadays" ? In which century did big corporations behave responsibly ? Of course Facebook didn't fix anything in Myanmar - the new junta government is both the one running the troll farms and responsible for the previous genocide !