5 ms·

If I was a tech billionaire, and there was so much uploading of stuff so bad, that it was giving my employee/contractors PTSD, I think I'd find a way to stop th

by neilv 2y ago

If I was a tech billionaire, and there was so much uploading of stuff so bad, that it was giving my employee/contractors PTSD, I think I'd find a way to stop the perpetrators. (I'm not saying that I'd assemble a high-speed yacht full of commandos, who travel around the world, righting wrongs when no one else can. Though that would be more compelling content than most streaming video episodes right now. So you could offset the operational costs a bit.)

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
How else would you stop the perpetrators?
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Large scale and super sick perpetrators exist (as compared to small scale ones who do mildly sick stuff) because Facebook is a global network and there is a benefit to operating on such a large platform. The sicker you are, while getting away with it, the more reward you get. Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. Easy for the moderators to shut stuff down very quickly.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Tricky. It also gives perpetrators a lot more places to hide. I think the jury is out on whether a few centralized networks or a fediverse makes it harder for attackers to reach potential targets (or customers).
    - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      The purpose of facebook moderators (besides legal compliance) is to protect normal people from the "sick" people. In a federated network, of course, such people will create their own instances, and hide there. But then no one is harmed from them, because all such instances will be banned quite quickly, same as all spam email hosts are blocked very quickly by everyone else. From a normal person perspective on not seeing bad stuff, the design of a federated network is inherently better than a global network.
      - shadowgovt 2y ago
        That's the theory. I'm not sure yet that it works in practice, I've seen a lot of people on Mastodon complaining about how as a moderator, keeping up with the bad services is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole because everything is access on by default. Maybe this is a Mastodon specific issue.
        abdullahkhalids 2y ago
        That's because Mastodon or any other federated social network hasn't taken off, and so not enough development has gone into them. If they take off, naturally people will develop analogs of spam lists and SpamAssassin etc for such systems, which will cut down moderation time significantly. I run an org email server, and don't exactly do any thing besides installing such automated tools. On Mastodon, admins will just have to do the additional work to make sure new accounts are not posting weird stuff.
    - mu53 2y ago
      Big tech vastly underspends on this area. You can find a stream of articles from the last 10 years where BigTech companies were allowing open child prostitution, paid-for violence, and other stuff on their platforms with little to no moderation.
  - throwie21873 2y ago
    > Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. The #2 and #3 most popular Mastodon instances allow CSAM.
llm_trw 2y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  In this context, this is dangerously close to asserting "people are only outraged about CSAM because they're told to be." I don't think that's what you mean.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    It is exactly what I mean. If you don't nurture that outrage every day than you'd be rather surprised what can happen to a culture in a single generation.
    - noduerme 2y ago
      I think your logic is backwards. The main reason for a culture to ban pedophilia is because it causes trauma in children. For thousands of years, cultures have progressed towards protecting children. This came from a natural sense of outrage in a majority of people, which became part of the culture. Not vice versa. In many of your comments, you seem to assume that people are only automatons who think and do exactly what their culture teaches them, but that's not the truth. The culture is made up of individuals, and individual conscience frequently - thankfully - overrides cultural diktat. Otherwise no dictatorship would ever fall, no group of people would ever be freed, and no wicked practices would ever be stamped out. It has always been individual people acting against the culture whose outrage has caused the culture to change. Which strongly implies that people's sense of outrage is at least partly intrinsic to human nature, totally apart from cultural practices of the time.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        I'm now old enough to have seen people who treated homosexuals in the 1980s the same we treat pedophiles today start waving rainbow flags and calling the people they beat up for being gay in highschool Nazis. There maybe a few people with principles who stick with them. The majority will happily shove who ever they are told to in a gas chamber.
thrance 2y ago
If you were a tech billionaire you'd be a sociopath like the others and wouldn't give a single f about this. You'd be going on podcasts to tell the world that markets will fix everything if given the chance.
- richrichie 2y ago
  They are not wrong. Do you know any mechanism other than markets that work at scale and that don’t cost a bomb and don’t involve abusive central authority?
  - thrance 2y ago
    Tech billionaires usually advocate for some kind of return to the gilded age, with minimal workers rights and corporate tax. Markets were freer back then, how did that work out for the average man? Markets alone don't do anything for the average quality of life.
    - richrichie 2y ago
      Quality of life for the average man now is way better than it was at any time in history. A fact.
      - thrance 2y ago
        But is it solely because of markets? Would deregulation improve our lives further? I don't think so, and that is what I am talking about. Musk, Bezos, Andreessen and cie. are advocating for a particular laissez-faire flavor of capitalism, which historically has been very bad for the average man.

by neilv 2y ago

DiggyJohnson 2y ago

How else would you stop the perpetrators?

abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Large scale and super sick perpetrators exist (as compared to small scale ones who do mildly sick stuff) because Facebook is a global network and there is a benefit to operating on such a large platform. The sicker you are, while getting away with it, the more reward you get. Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. Easy for the moderators to shut stuff down very quickly.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Tricky. It also gives perpetrators a lot more places to hide. I think the jury is out on whether a few centralized networks or a fediverse makes it harder for attackers to reach potential targets (or customers).
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    The purpose of facebook moderators (besides legal compliance) is to protect normal people from the "sick" people. In a federated network, of course, such people will create their own instances, and hide there. But then no one is harmed from them, because all such instances will be banned quite quickly, same as all spam email hosts are blocked very quickly by everyone else. From a normal person perspective on not seeing bad stuff, the design of a federated network is inherently better than a global network.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      That's the theory. I'm not sure yet that it works in practice, I've seen a lot of people on Mastodon complaining about how as a moderator, keeping up with the bad services is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole because everything is access on by default. Maybe this is a Mastodon specific issue.
      - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
        That's because Mastodon or any other federated social network hasn't taken off, and so not enough development has gone into them. If they take off, naturally people will develop analogs of spam lists and SpamAssassin etc for such systems, which will cut down moderation time significantly. I run an org email server, and don't exactly do any thing besides installing such automated tools. On Mastodon, admins will just have to do the additional work to make sure new accounts are not posting weird stuff.
  - mu53 2y ago
    Big tech vastly underspends on this area. You can find a stream of articles from the last 10 years where BigTech companies were allowing open child prostitution, paid-for violence, and other stuff on their platforms with little to no moderation.
- throwie21873 2y ago
  > Switch to a federated social systems like Mastodon, with only a few thousand or ten thousand users per instance, and perpetrators will never be able to grow too large. The #2 and #3 most popular Mastodon instances allow CSAM.

llm_trw 2y ago

[flagged]

shadowgovt 2y ago
In this context, this is dangerously close to asserting "people are only outraged about CSAM because they're told to be." I don't think that's what you mean.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  It is exactly what I mean. If you don't nurture that outrage every day than you'd be rather surprised what can happen to a culture in a single generation.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    I think your logic is backwards. The main reason for a culture to ban pedophilia is because it causes trauma in children. For thousands of years, cultures have progressed towards protecting children. This came from a natural sense of outrage in a majority of people, which became part of the culture. Not vice versa. In many of your comments, you seem to assume that people are only automatons who think and do exactly what their culture teaches them, but that's not the truth. The culture is made up of individuals, and individual conscience frequently - thankfully - overrides cultural diktat. Otherwise no dictatorship would ever fall, no group of people would ever be freed, and no wicked practices would ever be stamped out. It has always been individual people acting against the culture whose outrage has caused the culture to change. Which strongly implies that people's sense of outrage is at least partly intrinsic to human nature, totally apart from cultural practices of the time.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      I'm now old enough to have seen people who treated homosexuals in the 1980s the same we treat pedophiles today start waving rainbow flags and calling the people they beat up for being gay in highschool Nazis. There maybe a few people with principles who stick with them. The majority will happily shove who ever they are told to in a gas chamber.

thrance 2y ago

If you were a tech billionaire you'd be a sociopath like the others and wouldn't give a single f about this. You'd be going on podcasts to tell the world that markets will fix everything if given the chance.

richrichie 2y ago
They are not wrong. Do you know any mechanism other than markets that work at scale and that don’t cost a bomb and don’t involve abusive central authority?
- thrance 2y ago
  Tech billionaires usually advocate for some kind of return to the gilded age, with minimal workers rights and corporate tax. Markets were freer back then, how did that work out for the average man? Markets alone don't do anything for the average quality of life.
  - richrichie 2y ago
    Quality of life for the average man now is way better than it was at any time in history. A fact.
    - thrance 2y ago
      But is it solely because of markets? Would deregulation improve our lives further? I don't think so, and that is what I am talking about. Musk, Bezos, Andreessen and cie. are advocating for a particular laissez-faire flavor of capitalism, which historically has been very bad for the average man.