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> the most generous number from the disclosed memos has Meta removing 5% of hate speech on Facebook. That would mean that for every 2,000 hateful posts or comme

> the most generous number from the disclosed memos has Meta removing 5% of hate speech on Facebook. That would mean that for every 2,000 hateful posts or comments, Meta removes about 100–95 automatically and 5 via user reports. Its really hard to contextualize these numbers. What are the comparable rates for other media? What % of hate speech on Mastodon is taken down? Twitter? YouTube? Discord? Comparing with old-school mob formation technology, what about leaflets handed out? Political rallies? Meta is an obvious target because they have such a high % of total online speech, and by virtue of this make a potentially impactful single intervention point to make things better. And these articles do make it seem they have room at the margin to improve. But imagine a word with multiple social networks per country - do we think they would be better or worse at policing this stuff (and crucially, the places where it matters are the developing less-regulated countries, often with governments that are at least disinterested in preventing the ethnic conflicts, if not actively promoting them)? I can see hand-wavey arguments in both directions but what I really want is data analyzing the question.

cultureswitch 3y ago
Less developed countries are typically more willing to and more abusive in controlling expression than more developed ones. That is by no means a rule though. The question, of course, is whether there is a political will to "police hate speech". In reality this already dubiously noble goal is as flexible as the definition of "terrorist organisation".
arczyx 3y ago
Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way more than 5%), and then decided to rollback it. > And this method works. In Myanmar, “reshare depth demotion” reduced “viral inflammatory prevalence” by 25% and cut “photo misinformation” almost in half. > In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were over.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  The free market has spoken, and it will gladly accept helping encourage a genocide in the name of profits.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    One of the reasons real Communism (the USSR variety, not what people in the US think Communism is) has such a hard time in the capitalist societies: It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits It's still the same people making the profits though. Regardless of what political/economic system you have, sociopaths will always gravitate towards whatever position allows them to acquire the most wealth and power. The only difference is whether they have the legal right to send men with guns to lock you up or kill you if you disobey them.
    - p_j_w 3y ago
      The fact that you lack the ability for creativity and nuance to such a degree that you scream “HAH, Stalin!” anytime someone criticizes the free market says more about you than the point you’re arguing against.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        I actually critized the free market for being totally fine with, e.g., fascism, or any kind of atrocoty as long as profits are to be made...
        fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Surely you aren’t asserting the Soviet Union committed no atrocities and was an angelic society of benevolent leaders blessing the harmonious proletariat? In any society composed of humans, the shitburgers will find a way to shit on the largest groups of people they can using whatever instrument of power is available. In the US it’s dollars, in the USSR, its influence and power.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 3y ago
It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a case like Myanmar. First there would be the delay of the rest of the community understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the network. Fourth they can't stop the Myanmar government from setting up its own Mastodon instances, blocking access to outside instances, etc. You'd better believe that if Modi keeps going down the road he is going on that India will kick out all western social media companies if they try to block his campaign of dehumanizing non-hindus. From my perspective there is a lot of harmful talk that goes on social media that falls short of hate speech. In terms of my own feed I have keyword blocks against most Republican primary candidates (not Nikki Haley though) and there are many other topics that I think people are not capable of having a civil and productive conversation on or that I just don't want to be exposed to. A lot of stuff on the slippery slope to "hate speech" is blocked by this and it is OK when I do it because it is my own feed, but you'd better believe there are lots of people who think they have something so important to say that it would be crime to "censor" their shit (for lack of a better word) if the block affected more than just me. Unfortunately the discussion around A.I. is dominated by positions like: (1) ChatGPT is the God at the end of the universe that Teilhard de Chardin told us about, or (2) It was just fine that Google stole everybody's content for years and years but all of a sudden ChatGPT came out and be outraged all of a sudden at this rip-off. The truth about it is that machine learning algorithms over text have terrible performance, even the good ones. The performance curves look something like https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/plot_roc.html#sphx-glr-auto-examples-model-selection-plot-roc-py https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/... and for my RSS reader I am happy to approach an AUC of 0.8, an AUC of > 0.95 for most tasks is getting into science fiction territory. And that's nowhere near being able to clean up hate speech at the rate that it should be cleared. The short of it is that if you want to get rid of a lot more than "5%" of the outright "hate speech" you will also get rid of a lot of "dislike speech" and "angry speech" and "annoyed speech" as well as some "innocent speech". To be really frank my filter deletes anything about "cis" and "trans" because it I think maybe 10% of what people say on the subject is outright hateful, 80% of it is emotionally negative, maybe 10% of the time somebody has something neutral or positive to say. My take is that losing a small amount of content I might want to see for being free of a lot of negativity is a bargain I am willing to make. A platform that imposed that kind of judgement on the community could be a much more emotionally positive place than anything you've seen but it is also going to get all sorts of criticism from people for doing so.
erie 3y ago
Facebook has been the internet in Myanmar,' Entering the country in 2010, Facebook initially allowed its app to be used without incurring data charges, so it gained rapid popularity. It would come pre-loaded on phones bought at mobile shops and was a cultural fit.'
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Discord (and maybe Mastodon ??) don't operate through engagement, so I'm not sure why you put them on the list ?
- anon84873628 3y ago
  The Facebook apologists always conveniently forget that Facebook's algorithms viralize content and decide what people see. I.e. the precise reason for their culpability.
intended 3y ago
The term is Prevalence. I have been looking for years, and have essentially shifted careers to find it. I didnt even have a name for it until recently. There is also no way to get the data you are looking for. As someone described it - this is akin to asking how much crime happens every day. You could get an approximation - For resourced languages though. Meta launched Hindi classifiers in 2021 and Bengali in 2022, covering 0.6bn and 0.24bn people, respectively. I know how poor the lexicons I have seen in the wild are, and how hard it is to stay ahead of terminology. Meta is probably doing more to stay ahead than others. However the ARPU for a user in the US vs India is stark. Platforms aren’t going to release the necessary data for even a rough approximation. Reddit was a potential data source to learn from, but now we have the API rules, so that is also closed off. Lucky us. Not to mention how supremely unprepared society is to actually understand or discuss the data without making it worse. Meta has more resources and frankly they regained my trust years ago. However, business is business. Twitter and Reddit have shown that in this current cycle, there are are no consequences for neglecting Trust and Safety, as shown by other companies. T&S teams have been reduced globally. T&S teams are being targeted and vilified. Next year, there are ~50 elections happening, including the USA and India. The network suits certain narratives - the more insular, fear driven ones. Trust and Safety teams are themselves being exposed. Its already looking like a perfect storm.

cultureswitch 3y ago

Less developed countries are typically more willing to and more abusive in controlling expression than more developed ones. That is by no means a rule though. The question, of course, is whether there is a political will to "police hate speech". In reality this already dubiously noble goal is as flexible as the definition of "terrorist organisation".

arczyx 3y ago

Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way more than 5%), and then decided to rollback it. > And this method works. In Myanmar, “reshare depth demotion” reduced “viral inflammatory prevalence” by 25% and cut “photo misinformation” almost in half. > In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were over.

p_j_w 3y ago
The free market has spoken, and it will gladly accept helping encourage a genocide in the name of profits.
- hef19898 3y ago
  One of the reasons real Communism (the USSR variety, not what people in the US think Communism is) has such a hard time in the capitalist societies: It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >It is the only form of authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits It's still the same people making the profits though. Regardless of what political/economic system you have, sociopaths will always gravitate towards whatever position allows them to acquire the most wealth and power. The only difference is whether they have the legal right to send men with guns to lock you up or kill you if you disobey them.
  - p_j_w 3y ago
    The fact that you lack the ability for creativity and nuance to such a degree that you scream “HAH, Stalin!” anytime someone criticizes the free market says more about you than the point you’re arguing against.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      I actually critized the free market for being totally fine with, e.g., fascism, or any kind of atrocoty as long as profits are to be made...
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Surely you aren’t asserting the Soviet Union committed no atrocities and was an angelic society of benevolent leaders blessing the harmonious proletariat? In any society composed of humans, the shitburgers will find a way to shit on the largest groups of people they can using whatever instrument of power is available. In the US it’s dollars, in the USSR, its influence and power.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 3y ago

It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a case like Myanmar. First there would be the delay of the rest of the community understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the network. Fourth they can't stop the Myanmar government from setting up its own Mastodon instances, blocking access to outside instances, etc. You'd better believe that if Modi keeps going down the road he is going on that India will kick out all western social media companies if they try to block his campaign of dehumanizing non-hindus. From my perspective there is a lot of harmful talk that goes on social media that falls short of hate speech. In terms of my own feed I have keyword blocks against most Republican primary candidates (not Nikki Haley though) and there are many other topics that I think people are not capable of having a civil and productive conversation on or that I just don't want to be exposed to. A lot of stuff on the slippery slope to "hate speech" is blocked by this and it is OK when I do it because it is my own feed, but you'd better believe there are lots of people who think they have something so important to say that it would be crime to "censor" their shit (for lack of a better word) if the block affected more than just me. Unfortunately the discussion around A.I. is dominated by positions like: (1) ChatGPT is the God at the end of the universe that Teilhard de Chardin told us about, or (2) It was just fine that Google stole everybody's content for years and years but all of a sudden ChatGPT came out and be outraged all of a sudden at this rip-off. The truth about it is that machine learning algorithms over text have terrible performance, even the good ones. The performance curves look something like https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/plot_roc.html#sphx-glr-auto-examples-model-selection-plot-roc-py https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/... and for my RSS reader I am happy to approach an AUC of 0.8, an AUC of > 0.95 for most tasks is getting into science fiction territory. And that's nowhere near being able to clean up hate speech at the rate that it should be cleared. The short of it is that if you want to get rid of a lot more than "5%" of the outright "hate speech" you will also get rid of a lot of "dislike speech" and "angry speech" and "annoyed speech" as well as some "innocent speech". To be really frank my filter deletes anything about "cis" and "trans" because it I think maybe 10% of what people say on the subject is outright hateful, 80% of it is emotionally negative, maybe 10% of the time somebody has something neutral or positive to say. My take is that losing a small amount of content I might want to see for being free of a lot of negativity is a bargain I am willing to make. A platform that imposed that kind of judgement on the community could be a much more emotionally positive place than anything you've seen but it is also going to get all sorts of criticism from people for doing so.

erie 3y ago

Facebook has been the internet in Myanmar,' Entering the country in 2010, Facebook initially allowed its app to be used without incurring data charges, so it gained rapid popularity. It would come pre-loaded on phones bought at mobile shops and was a cultural fit.'

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Discord (and maybe Mastodon ??) don't operate through engagement, so I'm not sure why you put them on the list ?

anon84873628 3y ago
The Facebook apologists always conveniently forget that Facebook's algorithms viralize content and decide what people see. I.e. the precise reason for their culpability.

intended 3y ago

The term is Prevalence. I have been looking for years, and have essentially shifted careers to find it. I didnt even have a name for it until recently. There is also no way to get the data you are looking for. As someone described it - this is akin to asking how much crime happens every day. You could get an approximation - For resourced languages though. Meta launched Hindi classifiers in 2021 and Bengali in 2022, covering 0.6bn and 0.24bn people, respectively. I know how poor the lexicons I have seen in the wild are, and how hard it is to stay ahead of terminology. Meta is probably doing more to stay ahead than others. However the ARPU for a user in the US vs India is stark. Platforms aren’t going to release the necessary data for even a rough approximation. Reddit was a potential data source to learn from, but now we have the API rules, so that is also closed off. Lucky us. Not to mention how supremely unprepared society is to actually understand or discuss the data without making it worse. Meta has more resources and frankly they regained my trust years ago. However, business is business. Twitter and Reddit have shown that in this current cycle, there are are no consequences for neglecting Trust and Safety, as shown by other companies. T&S teams have been reduced globally. T&S teams are being targeted and vilified. Next year, there are ~50 elections happening, including the USA and India. The network suits certain narratives - the more insular, fear driven ones. Trust and Safety teams are themselves being exposed. Its already looking like a perfect storm.