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It is sometimes easy to say in retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story. But they did and they trusted the US Administration. Facebook is international.
by firesteelrain 2y ago
It is sometimes easy to say in retrospect we shouldn’t have demoted the story. But they did and they trusted the US Administration.
Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that which could be viewed as propaganda in the US?
Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
We have tried many different moderation models and not all of them work.
If we try the Reddit route, then we could have incredible bias in moderated communities.
What about fitting the StackOverflow model to social media?
Another route is how X provides for the Community Notes feature. Would that have worked? Is Community Notes still susceptible to the same bias?
- Timber-6539 2y agoThe shocking answer to this moderation question is not what most people want i.e free speech.
- jncfhnb 2y agoPeople absolutely don’t of want maximal free speech. Moderation is a blessing
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoYeah. There's a reason I'm on HN, and not on 4chan. (But 4chan is there, if that's what you want...)
- beart 2y agoEven 4chan has moderation
- chgs 2y agoMost people don’t want free speech, and no country has free speech anyway. The question is what limits are made.
- tyre 2y agoThe United States has free speech by all but the most extreme definitions. The 1st Amendment is well-tested and supported by the courts. Sometimes, like in Citizens United, to an extremely flexible definition of speech (political campaign donations by corporations.)
- mandmandam 2y agoThe right to speak, but not the right to be heard. That costs money. Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can be placed in a "free speech zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured.
- hiatus 2y ago> Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured. Do you have any examples of this happening?
- mandmandam 2y agoThe most high profile examples are Assange [0] and Chelsea Manning [1]. Daniel Hale. [2] John Kiriakou*. [3] Sami al-Hajj [4]. Snowden chose exile over torture, and so has been separated from his family for over a decade. Many people were tortured that didn't even work as journalists; just victims of bad metadata or the wrong name. Many countries and organizations even consider so-called "standard practice" in American jails to constitute torture. Solitary confinement, sometimes for years. Refusal of basic medical care, nutrition, sanitation. Physical abuse from guards. Unmarked graves behind the jail [5]. Nowadays even environmental lawyers can get put in jail for the crime of winning judgments against fossil fuel companies (Donziger [6]). * - Wasn't physically tortured, but he did reveal torture and was heavily retaliated against for his trouble. ... 0 - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67362031444-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/01/02/chelsea-manning-torture-prison-united-nations/ https://theintercept.com/2020/01/02/chelsea-manning-torture-... 2 - https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-dd3111dc6e49c373dea806428edd4321 https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-dd3111dc6... 3 - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-officer-is-the-first-to-face-prison-for-a-classified-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-officer-is-... 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Hajj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Hajj 5 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/families-in-disbelief-after-hundreds-of-bodies-found-buried-behind-mississippi-jail https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/families-in-disbelief-afte... 6 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-chevron-foe-donzigers-contempt-conviction-stand-2023-03-27/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-chevron-...
- krapp 2y agoModeration is an expression of free speech. Coerced speech is not free speech.
- Timber-6539 2y agoModeration exists as a form of farce to free speech.
- krapp 2y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯ free speech is free speech even when you don't like the way it's used. Your right to say what you want doesn't supersede my right not to grant you a platform or even give you the time of day. Even Ben Franklin "moderated" the content of his newspaper. He didn't feel that free speech obligated him to print anything he was given. So this isn't a radical new concept. Freedom of speech and freedom from speech are two sides of the same coin, just as freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. Moderation isn't a violation of free speech, nor is it a farce. It's free speech being exercised as it was intended.
- Timber-6539 2y agoYou are conflating editorial rights with some form of free speech. Free speech doesn't require a platform to work nor any intermediary. It is a boundless idea.
- krapp 2y ago"Editorial rights" are free speech, they're one and the same. Nowhere in my comment did I claim free speech requires a platform or an intermediary, they happen to be relevant in the context of the discussion we're having, just as television would be relevant to a discussion of free speech in broadcasting. Free speech doesn't require telecommunications infrastructure, yet it still applies, and broadcasters (even of public access stations) have the right to refuse to air content they don't want to. You're the one putting limits on free speech despite also calling it a boundless idea.
- actionfromafar 2y agoHow much algorithmic push to which free speech?
- Etheryte 2y agoI'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or politics. How do you imagine that would work?
- firesteelrain 2y agoI was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes. Data could be anonymized and provided via API for research purposes.
- lupusreal 2y ago> Data could be anonymized I fucking doubt it.
- ecuaflo 2y agoI want something like you described up until you mentioned moderation. There wouldn’t be a need for it. That’s the whole issue with a single decider getting to suppress content that the rest of your solution solved.
- firesteelrain 2y agoI was using Moderation logs as an abstract concept of the actions taken to promote or demote content. It would be decentralized
- immibis 2y ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 2y agoHow is this different from Reddit, besides the moderation logs being public? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds exactly the same.
- imadierich 2y ago[dead]
- GeekyBear 2y agoThe problem with Covid censorship (a problem not limited to Facebook) was that Covid was an airborne virus, and the arbiters of allowable speech decided that the truth about Covid was "misinformation" that needed to be suppressed. How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airborne spread (like the measles)?
- mandmandam 2y agoNot just that. Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists. All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies. Etc. The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book. Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
- chasd00 2y agoIt was even here in HN a community of pretty normal people. Remember the discussions of Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? Any mention of it and you were shouted down and blood was surely going to run in the streets of Sweden by dawn the next day. I lost a lot of faith in the HN community then. The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.
- cempaka 2y agoOne particular big name commenter here was still defending mass firings under the OSHA mandate in late 2022 / early 2023.
- 3np 2y ago> Facebook > Reddit > StackOverflow > Twitter Community Notes These are all examples of vertically integrated corporate-run centralized platforms and therefore have inherently unilateral centralized moderation with the same sets of legal requirements regarding alignment of policies and enforcement. They are all the same model, effectively. > Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19? Nobody. Hopefully. There are moderation models which do not have these restrictions but they are inherently incompatible with these platforms. The fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads/etc) is one example of a different model. I personally think it's obvious this is not a complete answer, easily observed by drama-driven defederation politics. We need to be exploring and adopting improved moderation mechanisms and tools for networks like Nostr, BlueSky, Matrix, and keep do the same for the infrastructure layer. Couple the recent UN convention against cybercrime[0] and the EU "SecEUrity Package"[1] with the arrest of Pavel Durov and I hope some of you reading this will wake up to the shift in relevance and urgency of the topics of decentralization and more serious use of E2EE and signatures. This includes taking a critical look at the TLS layer, PKI, and the roles of companies like CloudFlare and Akamai. I'd say a thing or two about the intertwined constriction of the financial rails, deprecation of cash, and the relevance of cryptocurrency... But let's keep that at that. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211976 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un-draft-cybercrime-convention https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un... [1]: https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have-more-say-in-the-eu-policy-making-process-says-swedish-government/ https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...