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> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible. But the people who are the primary victims of the false positives and the people who want the bad stuff fully censored aren't all the same people, and then the second group likes to pretend that there is a magic solution that doesn't throw the first group under the bus, so they can throw the first group under the bus.

bigfatkitten 1y ago
> The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. It’s worse than that. Companies actively refuse to do anything about content that is reported to them directly, at least until the media kicks up a stink. Nobody disputes that reliably detecting bad content is hard, but doing nothing about bad content you know about is inexcusable. https://archive.is/8dq8q https://archive.is/8dq8q
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  Your link says the opposite of what you claim: > Meta said it has in the past two years taken down 27 pedophile networks and is planning more removals. Moreover, the rest of the article is describing the difficulty in doing moderation. If you make a general purpose algorithm that links up people with similar interests and then there is a group of people with an interest in child abuse, the algorithm doesn't inherently know that and if you push on it to try to make it do something different in that case than it does in the general case, the people you're trying to thwart will actively take countermeasures like using different keywords or using coded language. Meanwhile user reporting features are also full of false positives or corporate and political operatives trying to have legitimate content removed, so expecting them to both immediately and perfectly respond to every report is unreasonable. Pretending that this is easy to solve is the thing authoritarians do to justify steamrolling innocent people because nobody can fully eliminate the problem nobody has any good way to fully eliminate.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    > Your link says the opposite of what you claim I don’t know where you got that from. Meta’s self-congratulatory takedown of “27 pedophile networks” is a drop in the ocean. Here’s a fairly typical example of them actively deciding to do nothing in response to a report. This mirrors my own experience. > Like other platforms, Instagram says it enlists its users to help detect accounts that are breaking rules. But those efforts haven’t always been effective. > Sometimes user reports of nudity involving a child went unanswered for months, according to a review of scores of reports filed over the last year by numerous child-safety advocates. > Earlier this year, an anti-pedophile activist discovered an Instagram account claiming to belong to a girl selling underage-sex content, including a post declaring, “This teen is ready for you pervs.” When the activist reported the account, Instagram responded with an automated message saying: “Because of the high volume of reports we receive, our team hasn’t been able to review this post.” > After the same activist reported another post, this one of a scantily clad young girl with a graphically sexual caption, Instagram responded, “Our review team has found that [the account’s] post does not go against our Community Guidelines.” The response suggested that the user hide the account to avoid seeing its content.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Your claim was that they "actively refuse" to do anything about it, but they clearly do actually take measures. As mentioned, the issue is that they get zillions of reports and vast numbers of them are organized scammers trying to get them to take down legitimate content. Then you report something real and it gets lost in an sea of fake reports. What are they supposed to do about that? It takes far fewer resources to file a fake report than investigate one and nobody can drink the entire ocean.
      - fc417fc802 1y ago
        Active refusal can (and commonly does) take the form of intentionally being unable to respond or merely putting on such an appearance. One of the curious things about Twitter pre-aquisition was that underage content somewhat frequently stayed up for months while discriminatory remarks were generally taken down rapidly. Post acquisition such content seemed to disappear approximately overnight. If the system is pathologically unable to deal with false reports to the extent that moderation has effectively ground to a standstill perhaps the regulator ought to get involved at that point and force the company to either change its ways or go out of business trying?
marcus_holmes 1y ago
This. This legislation has got nothing to do with moderation or "protecting children" - that's just the excuse that the government is using to push the legislation through. There are better ways of achieving that goal if that was the goal. The actual goal is, as always, complete control over what Australians can see and do on the internet, and complete knowledge of what we see and do on the internet.
- globalnode 1y ago
  i think governments are confused by the internet. on the one hand business uses it to save money and pay taxes. broligarch's get rich from it. yet it exposes the unwashed masses to all sorts of information that might otherwise face censorship. theres always sex and drugs you can use as a reason to clamp down on things. the tough thing for them will be how do you reign in the plebs while also allowing business and advertising to function unfettered... tough times ahead :p p.s. i agree with your comment.
- l0ng1nu5 1y ago
  Agreed but would also add the ability to prosecute anyone who writes something they don't like/agree with.
  - account42 1y ago
    They can already do that, see e.g. what the UK is doing in response to tweets. You don't need identity verification to have an ISP tell you the person behind an IP.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      IP addresses don't have anything like a 1:1 mapping to human beings and it's pretty trivial and inexpensive to get one from someone other than your ISP (e.g. use a VPN) if you have any concerns about that sort of thing.
- florkbork 1y ago
  Pfft. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=LEGISLATION;id=legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0001;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0000%22 https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.... Read it. It is specifically targeting companies who currently run riot over young individual's digital identity, flog it off to marketers, and treat them as a product.
jackvalentine 1y ago
> This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible. Manufactured by whom? Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done. The magic solution is if you can't operate at scale safely, don't operate at scale.
- g-b-r 1y ago
  Were web searches moderated?
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Manufactured by whom? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent > Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done. The difference isn't the scale of Google, it's the scale of the internet. Back in the day the internet was full of university professors and telecommunications operators. Now it has Russian hackers and an entire battalion of shady SEO specialists. If you want to build a search engine that competes with Google, it doesn't matter if you have 0.1% of the users and 0.001% of the market cap, you're still expected to index the whole internet. Which nobody could possibly do by hand anymore.
  - jackvalentine 1y ago
    Maybe search is dead but doesn’t know it yet. Edit: you can’t just grow a Wikipedia link to manufacturing consent from the 80s as an explanation here. What a joke of a position. Maybe people have been hoodwinked by a media conspiracy or maybe they just don’t like what the kids are exposed to at a young age these days.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
Nursie 1y ago
> The fact is that moderation is hard Moderation is hard when you prioritise growth and ad revenue over moderation, certainly. We know a good solution - throw a lot of manpower at it. That may not be feasible for the giant platforms... Oh no.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  This is the weirdest theory. The premise is that you admit the huge corporations with billions of dollars don't have the resources to pay moderators to contend with the professional-grade malicious content by profitable criminal syndicates, but some tiny forum is supposed to be able to get it perfect so they don't go to jail?
  - Nursie 1y ago
    > The premise is that you admit the huge corporations with billions of dollars don't have the resources to pay moderator My contention is more that they don’t have the will, because it would impact profits and that it’s possible that if they did implement effective moderation at scale it might hurt their bottom line so much they are unable to keep operating. Further, that I would not lament such a passing. I’m not saying tiny forums are some sort of panacea, merely that huge operations should not be able to get away with (for example) blatant fraudulent advertising on their platforms, on the basis that “we can’t possibly look at all of it”. Find a way, or stop operating that service.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > My contention is more that they don’t have the will, because it would impact profits and that it’s possible that if they did implement effective moderation at scale it might hurt their bottom line so much they are unable to keep operating. Is the theory supposed to be that the moderation would cost them users, or that the cost of paying for the moderation would cut too much into their profits? Because the first one doesn't make a lot of sense, the perpetrators of these crimes are a trivial minority of their user base that inherently cost more in trouble than they're worth in revenue. And the problem with the second one is that the cost of doing it properly would not only cut into the bottom line but put them deep into the red on a permanent basis, and then it's not so much a matter of unwillingness but inability. > I’m not saying tiny forums are some sort of panacea, merely that huge operations should not be able to get away with (for example) blatant fraudulent advertising on their platforms, on the basis that “we can’t possibly look at all of it”. Should the small forums be able to get away with it though? Because they're the ones even more likely to be operating with a third party ad network they neither have visibility into nor have the leverage to influence. > Further, that I would not lament such a passing. If Facebook was vaporized and replaced with some kind of large non-profit or decentralized system or just a less invasive corporation, would I cheer? Probably. But if every social network was eliminated and replaced with nothing... not so much.
cmoski 1y ago
I think it is less about stopping them from seeing naked pictures etc and more about stopping them getting sucked into the addictive shithole of social media. It will also make it harder for the grubby men in their 30s and 40s to groom 14yo girls on Snapchat, which is a bonus.

bigfatkitten 1y ago

> The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. It’s worse than that. Companies actively refuse to do anything about content that is reported to them directly, at least until the media kicks up a stink. Nobody disputes that reliably detecting bad content is hard, but doing nothing about bad content you know about is inexcusable. https://archive.is/8dq8q https://archive.is/8dq8q

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
Your link says the opposite of what you claim: > Meta said it has in the past two years taken down 27 pedophile networks and is planning more removals. Moreover, the rest of the article is describing the difficulty in doing moderation. If you make a general purpose algorithm that links up people with similar interests and then there is a group of people with an interest in child abuse, the algorithm doesn't inherently know that and if you push on it to try to make it do something different in that case than it does in the general case, the people you're trying to thwart will actively take countermeasures like using different keywords or using coded language. Meanwhile user reporting features are also full of false positives or corporate and political operatives trying to have legitimate content removed, so expecting them to both immediately and perfectly respond to every report is unreasonable. Pretending that this is easy to solve is the thing authoritarians do to justify steamrolling innocent people because nobody can fully eliminate the problem nobody has any good way to fully eliminate.
- bigfatkitten 1y ago
  > Your link says the opposite of what you claim I don’t know where you got that from. Meta’s self-congratulatory takedown of “27 pedophile networks” is a drop in the ocean. Here’s a fairly typical example of them actively deciding to do nothing in response to a report. This mirrors my own experience. > Like other platforms, Instagram says it enlists its users to help detect accounts that are breaking rules. But those efforts haven’t always been effective. > Sometimes user reports of nudity involving a child went unanswered for months, according to a review of scores of reports filed over the last year by numerous child-safety advocates. > Earlier this year, an anti-pedophile activist discovered an Instagram account claiming to belong to a girl selling underage-sex content, including a post declaring, “This teen is ready for you pervs.” When the activist reported the account, Instagram responded with an automated message saying: “Because of the high volume of reports we receive, our team hasn’t been able to review this post.” > After the same activist reported another post, this one of a scantily clad young girl with a graphically sexual caption, Instagram responded, “Our review team has found that [the account’s] post does not go against our Community Guidelines.” The response suggested that the user hide the account to avoid seeing its content.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    Your claim was that they "actively refuse" to do anything about it, but they clearly do actually take measures. As mentioned, the issue is that they get zillions of reports and vast numbers of them are organized scammers trying to get them to take down legitimate content. Then you report something real and it gets lost in an sea of fake reports. What are they supposed to do about that? It takes far fewer resources to file a fake report than investigate one and nobody can drink the entire ocean.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      Active refusal can (and commonly does) take the form of intentionally being unable to respond or merely putting on such an appearance. One of the curious things about Twitter pre-aquisition was that underage content somewhat frequently stayed up for months while discriminatory remarks were generally taken down rapidly. Post acquisition such content seemed to disappear approximately overnight. If the system is pathologically unable to deal with false reports to the extent that moderation has effectively ground to a standstill perhaps the regulator ought to get involved at that point and force the company to either change its ways or go out of business trying?

marcus_holmes 1y ago

This. This legislation has got nothing to do with moderation or "protecting children" - that's just the excuse that the government is using to push the legislation through. There are better ways of achieving that goal if that was the goal. The actual goal is, as always, complete control over what Australians can see and do on the internet, and complete knowledge of what we see and do on the internet.

globalnode 1y ago
i think governments are confused by the internet. on the one hand business uses it to save money and pay taxes. broligarch's get rich from it. yet it exposes the unwashed masses to all sorts of information that might otherwise face censorship. theres always sex and drugs you can use as a reason to clamp down on things. the tough thing for them will be how do you reign in the plebs while also allowing business and advertising to function unfettered... tough times ahead :p p.s. i agree with your comment.
l0ng1nu5 1y ago
Agreed but would also add the ability to prosecute anyone who writes something they don't like/agree with.
- account42 1y ago
  They can already do that, see e.g. what the UK is doing in response to tweets. You don't need identity verification to have an ISP tell you the person behind an IP.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    IP addresses don't have anything like a 1:1 mapping to human beings and it's pretty trivial and inexpensive to get one from someone other than your ISP (e.g. use a VPN) if you have any concerns about that sort of thing.
florkbork 1y ago
Pfft. https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=LEGISLATION;id=legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0001;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fbills%2Fr7284_aspassed%2F0000%22 https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.... Read it. It is specifically targeting companies who currently run riot over young individual's digital identity, flog it off to marketers, and treat them as a product.

jackvalentine 1y ago

> This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible. Manufactured by whom? Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done. The magic solution is if you can't operate at scale safely, don't operate at scale.

g-b-r 1y ago
Were web searches moderated?
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Manufactured by whom? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent > Moderation was done very tightly on vbulletin forums back in the day, the difference is Facebook/Google et al expect to operate at a scale where (they claim) moderation can't be done. The difference isn't the scale of Google, it's the scale of the internet. Back in the day the internet was full of university professors and telecommunications operators. Now it has Russian hackers and an entire battalion of shady SEO specialists. If you want to build a search engine that competes with Google, it doesn't matter if you have 0.1% of the users and 0.001% of the market cap, you're still expected to index the whole internet. Which nobody could possibly do by hand anymore.
- jackvalentine 1y ago
  Maybe search is dead but doesn’t know it yet. Edit: you can’t just grow a Wikipedia link to manufacturing consent from the 80s as an explanation here. What a joke of a position. Maybe people have been hoodwinked by a media conspiracy or maybe they just don’t like what the kids are exposed to at a young age these days.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago

Nursie 1y ago

> The fact is that moderation is hard Moderation is hard when you prioritise growth and ad revenue over moderation, certainly. We know a good solution - throw a lot of manpower at it. That may not be feasible for the giant platforms... Oh no.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
This is the weirdest theory. The premise is that you admit the huge corporations with billions of dollars don't have the resources to pay moderators to contend with the professional-grade malicious content by profitable criminal syndicates, but some tiny forum is supposed to be able to get it perfect so they don't go to jail?
- Nursie 1y ago
  > The premise is that you admit the huge corporations with billions of dollars don't have the resources to pay moderator My contention is more that they don’t have the will, because it would impact profits and that it’s possible that if they did implement effective moderation at scale it might hurt their bottom line so much they are unable to keep operating. Further, that I would not lament such a passing. I’m not saying tiny forums are some sort of panacea, merely that huge operations should not be able to get away with (for example) blatant fraudulent advertising on their platforms, on the basis that “we can’t possibly look at all of it”. Find a way, or stop operating that service.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > My contention is more that they don’t have the will, because it would impact profits and that it’s possible that if they did implement effective moderation at scale it might hurt their bottom line so much they are unable to keep operating. Is the theory supposed to be that the moderation would cost them users, or that the cost of paying for the moderation would cut too much into their profits? Because the first one doesn't make a lot of sense, the perpetrators of these crimes are a trivial minority of their user base that inherently cost more in trouble than they're worth in revenue. And the problem with the second one is that the cost of doing it properly would not only cut into the bottom line but put them deep into the red on a permanent basis, and then it's not so much a matter of unwillingness but inability. > I’m not saying tiny forums are some sort of panacea, merely that huge operations should not be able to get away with (for example) blatant fraudulent advertising on their platforms, on the basis that “we can’t possibly look at all of it”. Should the small forums be able to get away with it though? Because they're the ones even more likely to be operating with a third party ad network they neither have visibility into nor have the leverage to influence. > Further, that I would not lament such a passing. If Facebook was vaporized and replaced with some kind of large non-profit or decentralized system or just a less invasive corporation, would I cheer? Probably. But if every social network was eliminated and replaced with nothing... not so much.

cmoski 1y ago

I think it is less about stopping them from seeing naked pictures etc and more about stopping them getting sucked into the addictive shithole of social media. It will also make it harder for the grubby men in their 30s and 40s to groom 14yo girls on Snapchat, which is a bonus.