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dmix 2y ago
Meta barely changed their moderation policy. The community standard docs which list every violation are still extremely long and cover a large swath of speech https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/ https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/, to which they only added 2 bullet point exceptions (and eventually the future addition of community notes)
- sunshowers 2y ago
  The exceptions are not minor. Some groups can be called mentally ill, but other similarly situated groups cannot. It's a capitulation to the idea that speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
  - dmix 2y ago
    > speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset. Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. The point is FB is still very much on the former highly centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system side while only making small moves in the other direction with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that direction but what they say vs do is an important distinction.
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      To be clear, the people who believe speech standards should be determined by public opinion are as incorrect as, say, flat earthers. I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se. I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards just because large parts of the public have morally rotten views.
      - PathOfEclipse 2y ago
        [flagged]
        sunshowers 2y ago
        Centralized and diffused power are each vulnerable in their own ways -- diffused power to cults in particular. You'd generally expect people with more training to make better decisions than people with less training. Regardless, morality in general is quite objective. In particular, it is objectively the case that letting some groups of people be called mentally ill while other similarly situated groups not is bad. > Fact checking organizations proved themselves wildly left-biased Meh. The only thing that matters is whether they're reflecting objective reality (including objective moral reality). There's no a priori reason to believe that each political tendency is equally attached to reality.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        bandofthehawk 2y ago
        When the grandparent post said: > Fact checking organizations proved themselves wildly left-biased I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality. When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias.
        sunshowers 2y ago
        > I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality. But did it actually? > When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias. I wish what you were saying were true. In reality, motivated actors will call anything that shows them wrong biased. The whole point of having a scientific mindset is to try and ascertain what's true by building the best models one can. This often means a lot of inherent complexity, since the world is quite complex (map-territory relation). But humans prefer simpler models over more complex ones, which leads to bad outcomes.
    - captainbland 2y ago
      And it still works less well than community moderation.
      - thephyber 2y ago
        “Works less well” is a subjective claim. How are you evaluating this? Are you including the truth of the Facebook post, whether moderators correctly/accurately act upon the flagging, whether users choose to stick on the platform after seeing the content, whether users stop believing in any objective truth, or something else? Community notes only does fact-checking, but moderation has the ability to reduce the activity of bad actors. They serve 2 different purposes from where I stand.
    - worik 2y ago
      Let me make a correction please: > a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. You mean to say: "a top-down technocratic worldview vs majoritarian one." Majoritarian != Democracy
  - PathOfEclipse 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - computerthings 2y ago
        I searched for the first title and found LOTS of articles about it. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... I didn't go down the list, but I'll just note that you're not claiming any of the articles contain factually incorrect information. "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no.
        sunshowers 2y ago
        Thank you for the link to PBS. The article makes it clear that the government didn't actually order anything, and that Meta was free to agree or disagree. It also is worth noting that Zuckerberg himself is a motivated actor, who might be presenting a spin on facts favorable to his audience. > "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no. Well obviously the most heinous bits aren't publicly available. But I do know how that site routinely treats people like myself. edit: this bit is quite funny: > “I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other” despite analyses showing otherwise, he said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.” And yet he made a tremendous in-kind contribution by selectively relaxing speech standards, in a way that clearly favors one political tendency.
        jcgrillo 2y ago
  - baobun 2y ago
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  - roenxi 2y ago
    Speech standards should be determined by public opinion, science has never had a seat at the table in the West. If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering. The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence. The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      > Speech standards should be determined by public opinion To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement? > science has never had a seat at the table in the West. This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified. > If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering. What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications. > The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence. True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from. > The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable. I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Speech standards have never been set by "reason, evidence and a scientific mindset". The people who are complaining now that the shoe is on the other foot were quite happy when it was their side setting the rules. Objective standards would be best, but subjective standards that you pretend are objective are far worse than subjective standards that are honest about it.
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      I think what Meta did is objectively bad.
nntwozz 2y ago
“Our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life's meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same.” — Simone de Beauvoir
- vdjskshi 2y ago
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[flagged]

dmix 2y ago

Meta barely changed their moderation policy. The community standard docs which list every violation are still extremely long and cover a large swath of speech https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/ https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/, to which they only added 2 bullet point exceptions (and eventually the future addition of community notes)

sunshowers 2y ago
The exceptions are not minor. Some groups can be called mentally ill, but other similarly situated groups cannot. It's a capitulation to the idea that speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
- dmix 2y ago
  > speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset. Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. The point is FB is still very much on the former highly centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system side while only making small moves in the other direction with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that direction but what they say vs do is an important distinction.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    To be clear, the people who believe speech standards should be determined by public opinion are as incorrect as, say, flat earthers. I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se. I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards just because large parts of the public have morally rotten views.
    - PathOfEclipse 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - sunshowers 2y ago
        Centralized and diffused power are each vulnerable in their own ways -- diffused power to cults in particular. You'd generally expect people with more training to make better decisions than people with less training. Regardless, morality in general is quite objective. In particular, it is objectively the case that letting some groups of people be called mentally ill while other similarly situated groups not is bad. > Fact checking organizations proved themselves wildly left-biased Meh. The only thing that matters is whether they're reflecting objective reality (including objective moral reality). There's no a priori reason to believe that each political tendency is equally attached to reality.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        bandofthehawk 2y ago
        When the grandparent post said: > Fact checking organizations proved themselves wildly left-biased I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality. When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias.
        sunshowers 2y ago
        > I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality. But did it actually? > When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias. I wish what you were saying were true. In reality, motivated actors will call anything that shows them wrong biased. The whole point of having a scientific mindset is to try and ascertain what's true by building the best models one can. This often means a lot of inherent complexity, since the world is quite complex (map-territory relation). But humans prefer simpler models over more complex ones, which leads to bad outcomes.
  - captainbland 2y ago
    And it still works less well than community moderation.
    - thephyber 2y ago
      “Works less well” is a subjective claim. How are you evaluating this? Are you including the truth of the Facebook post, whether moderators correctly/accurately act upon the flagging, whether users choose to stick on the platform after seeing the content, whether users stop believing in any objective truth, or something else? Community notes only does fact-checking, but moderation has the ability to reduce the activity of bad actors. They serve 2 different purposes from where I stand.
  - worik 2y ago
    Let me make a correction please: > a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. You mean to say: "a top-down technocratic worldview vs majoritarian one." Majoritarian != Democracy
- PathOfEclipse 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - computerthings 2y ago
      I searched for the first title and found LOTS of articles about it. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-some-covid-19-content-during-the-pandemic https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... I didn't go down the list, but I'll just note that you're not claiming any of the articles contain factually incorrect information. "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no.
      - sunshowers 2y ago
        Thank you for the link to PBS. The article makes it clear that the government didn't actually order anything, and that Meta was free to agree or disagree. It also is worth noting that Zuckerberg himself is a motivated actor, who might be presenting a spin on facts favorable to his audience. > "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no. Well obviously the most heinous bits aren't publicly available. But I do know how that site routinely treats people like myself. edit: this bit is quite funny: > “I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other” despite analyses showing otherwise, he said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.” And yet he made a tremendous in-kind contribution by selectively relaxing speech standards, in a way that clearly favors one political tendency.
        jcgrillo 2y ago
- baobun 2y ago
  [dead]
- roenxi 2y ago
  Speech standards should be determined by public opinion, science has never had a seat at the table in the West. If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering. The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence. The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    > Speech standards should be determined by public opinion To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement? > science has never had a seat at the table in the West. This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified. > If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering. What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications. > The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence. True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from. > The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable. I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.
- lmm 2y ago
  Speech standards have never been set by "reason, evidence and a scientific mindset". The people who are complaining now that the shoe is on the other foot were quite happy when it was their side setting the rules. Objective standards would be best, but subjective standards that you pretend are objective are far worse than subjective standards that are honest about it.
  - sunshowers 2y ago
    I think what Meta did is objectively bad.

nntwozz 2y ago

“Our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life's meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same.” — Simone de Beauvoir

vdjskshi 2y ago
[dead]