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But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate? E.g. if you produce eggs and you c

But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate? E.g. if you produce eggs and you can't avoid salmonella at some point your operation should be shut down. Facebook and its ilk have massive profits, they can afford more moderators.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate? By this principle the government can't operate the criminal justice system anymore because it has too many false positives and uncaptured negative externalities and then you don't have anything to use to tell Facebook to censor things. > Facebook and its ilk have massive profits, they can afford more moderators. They have large absolute profits because of the large number of users but the profit per user is in the neighborhood of $1/month. How much human moderation do you think you can get for that?
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > By this principle the government can't operate the criminal justice system Obviously we make case by case decisions regarding such things. There are plenty of ways in which governments could act that populations in the west generally deem unacceptable. Private prisons in the US, for example, are quite controversial at present. It's worth noting that if the regulator actually enforces requirements then they become merely a cost of doing business that all participants are subject to. Such a development in this case could well mean that all the large social platforms operating within the Australian market start charging users in that region on the order of $30 per year to maintain an account.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > Obviously we make case by case decisions regarding such things. You can make case by case decisions regarding individual aspects of the system, but no modern criminal justice system exists that has never put an innocent person behind bars, much less on trial. Fiddling with the details can get you better or worse but it can't get you something that satisfies the principle that you can't operate if you can't operate without ever doing any harm to anyone. Which implies that principle is unreasonable and isn't of any use in other contexts either. > It's worth noting that if the regulator actually enforces requirements then they become merely a cost of doing business that all participants are subject to. Such a development in this case could well mean that all the large social platforms operating within the Australian market start charging users in that region on the order of $30 per year to maintain an account. The premise there is that you could solve the problem for $30 per person annually, i.e. $2.50/month. I'm left asking the question again, how much human moderation do you expect to get for that? Meanwhile, that's $30 per service. That's going to increase the network effect of any existing service because each additional recurring fee or requirement to submit payment data is a deterrent to using another one. And maybe the required fee would be more than that. Are you sure you want to entrench the incumbents as a permanent oligarchy?
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      That doesn't follow. The absolute of a principle being unobtainable doesn't mean it isn't of use. As I stated, you make a case by case judgment when applying it. That you aren't satisfied by the imperfection doesn't imply a lack of usefulness. I expect you can get quite a bit of moderation for that price. If a given user is exceeding that then they are likely so problematic that you will want to ban them anyway. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of users never act in a way that requires attention in the first place. If the law discriminates on size you don't end up with (or at least exacerbate) the oligarchy scenario. In fact it acts to counter network effects by economically incentivizing use of the smaller services.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > That doesn't follow. The absolute of a principle being unobtainable doesn't mean it isn't of use. As I stated, you make a case by case judgment when applying it. That you aren't satisfied by the imperfection doesn't imply a lack of usefulness. The principle was that if you can't operate without doing harm, you can't operate. But then nobody can operate, including the government. If you give up that absolutist principle and concede that there are trade offs in everything, that's the status quo and there's nothing to fix. They already have the incentive to spend a reasonable amount of resources to remove those users, because they don't want them. The unfortunacy is that spending a reasonable amount of resources doesn't fully get rid of them, and spending an unreasonable amount of resources (or making drastic trade offs against false positives) is unreasonable. > I expect you can get quite a bit of moderation for that price. If a given user is exceeding that then they are likely so problematic that you will want to ban them anyway. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of users never act in a way that requires attention in the first place. It's not about whether some specific user exceeds the threshold. You have a reporting system and some double-digit percentage of users will use it as an "I disagree with this poster's viewpoint" button. Competitors will use it to try to take down the competition's legitimate content. Criminal organizations will create fake accounts or use stolen credentials and use the reporting system to extort people into paying ransom or the fake accounts will mass report the victim's account, and then if even a small percentage of the fake reports make it through the filter, the victim loses their account. Meanwhile there are legitimate reports in there as well. You would then need enough human moderators to thoroughly investigate every one of those reports, taking into account context and possibly requiring familiarity with the specific account doing the posting to determine whether it was intended as satire or sarcasm. The accuracy has to be well in excess of 99% or you're screwed, because even a 1% false positive rate means the extortion scheme is effective because they file 1000 fake reports and the victim's account gets 10 strikes against it, and a 1% false negative rate means people make 1000 legitimate reports and they take down 990 of them but each of the 10 they got wrong has a story written about it in the newspaper. Banning the accounts posting the actual illegal content is what they already do, but those people just make new accounts. Banning the accounts of honest people who get a lot of fake reports makes the problem worse, because it makes it easier to do the extortion scheme and then more criminals do it. > If the law discriminates on size you don't end up with (or at least exacerbate) the oligarchy scenario. In fact it acts to counter network effects by economically incentivizing use of the smaller services. But that was the original issue -- if you exempt smaller services then smaller services get a competitive advantage, and then you're back to the services people actually using not being required to do aggressive moderation. The only benefit then is that you got the services to become smaller, and if that's the goal then why not just do it directly and pass a law capping entity size?

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> But this goes back to the original argument: maybe if you can't avoid causing harm then you shouldn't be allowed to operate? By this principle the government can't operate the criminal justice system anymore because it has too many false positives and uncaptured negative externalities and then you don't have anything to use to tell Facebook to censor things. > Facebook and its ilk have massive profits, they can afford more moderators. They have large absolute profits because of the large number of users but the profit per user is in the neighborhood of $1/month. How much human moderation do you think you can get for that?

fc417fc802 1y ago
> By this principle the government can't operate the criminal justice system Obviously we make case by case decisions regarding such things. There are plenty of ways in which governments could act that populations in the west generally deem unacceptable. Private prisons in the US, for example, are quite controversial at present. It's worth noting that if the regulator actually enforces requirements then they become merely a cost of doing business that all participants are subject to. Such a development in this case could well mean that all the large social platforms operating within the Australian market start charging users in that region on the order of $30 per year to maintain an account.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Obviously we make case by case decisions regarding such things. You can make case by case decisions regarding individual aspects of the system, but no modern criminal justice system exists that has never put an innocent person behind bars, much less on trial. Fiddling with the details can get you better or worse but it can't get you something that satisfies the principle that you can't operate if you can't operate without ever doing any harm to anyone. Which implies that principle is unreasonable and isn't of any use in other contexts either. > It's worth noting that if the regulator actually enforces requirements then they become merely a cost of doing business that all participants are subject to. Such a development in this case could well mean that all the large social platforms operating within the Australian market start charging users in that region on the order of $30 per year to maintain an account. The premise there is that you could solve the problem for $30 per person annually, i.e. $2.50/month. I'm left asking the question again, how much human moderation do you expect to get for that? Meanwhile, that's $30 per service. That's going to increase the network effect of any existing service because each additional recurring fee or requirement to submit payment data is a deterrent to using another one. And maybe the required fee would be more than that. Are you sure you want to entrench the incumbents as a permanent oligarchy?
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    That doesn't follow. The absolute of a principle being unobtainable doesn't mean it isn't of use. As I stated, you make a case by case judgment when applying it. That you aren't satisfied by the imperfection doesn't imply a lack of usefulness. I expect you can get quite a bit of moderation for that price. If a given user is exceeding that then they are likely so problematic that you will want to ban them anyway. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of users never act in a way that requires attention in the first place. If the law discriminates on size you don't end up with (or at least exacerbate) the oligarchy scenario. In fact it acts to counter network effects by economically incentivizing use of the smaller services.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > That doesn't follow. The absolute of a principle being unobtainable doesn't mean it isn't of use. As I stated, you make a case by case judgment when applying it. That you aren't satisfied by the imperfection doesn't imply a lack of usefulness. The principle was that if you can't operate without doing harm, you can't operate. But then nobody can operate, including the government. If you give up that absolutist principle and concede that there are trade offs in everything, that's the status quo and there's nothing to fix. They already have the incentive to spend a reasonable amount of resources to remove those users, because they don't want them. The unfortunacy is that spending a reasonable amount of resources doesn't fully get rid of them, and spending an unreasonable amount of resources (or making drastic trade offs against false positives) is unreasonable. > I expect you can get quite a bit of moderation for that price. If a given user is exceeding that then they are likely so problematic that you will want to ban them anyway. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of users never act in a way that requires attention in the first place. It's not about whether some specific user exceeds the threshold. You have a reporting system and some double-digit percentage of users will use it as an "I disagree with this poster's viewpoint" button. Competitors will use it to try to take down the competition's legitimate content. Criminal organizations will create fake accounts or use stolen credentials and use the reporting system to extort people into paying ransom or the fake accounts will mass report the victim's account, and then if even a small percentage of the fake reports make it through the filter, the victim loses their account. Meanwhile there are legitimate reports in there as well. You would then need enough human moderators to thoroughly investigate every one of those reports, taking into account context and possibly requiring familiarity with the specific account doing the posting to determine whether it was intended as satire or sarcasm. The accuracy has to be well in excess of 99% or you're screwed, because even a 1% false positive rate means the extortion scheme is effective because they file 1000 fake reports and the victim's account gets 10 strikes against it, and a 1% false negative rate means people make 1000 legitimate reports and they take down 990 of them but each of the 10 they got wrong has a story written about it in the newspaper. Banning the accounts posting the actual illegal content is what they already do, but those people just make new accounts. Banning the accounts of honest people who get a lot of fake reports makes the problem worse, because it makes it easier to do the extortion scheme and then more criminals do it. > If the law discriminates on size you don't end up with (or at least exacerbate) the oligarchy scenario. In fact it acts to counter network effects by economically incentivizing use of the smaller services. But that was the original issue -- if you exempt smaller services then smaller services get a competitive advantage, and then you're back to the services people actually using not being required to do aggressive moderation. The only benefit then is that you got the services to become smaller, and if that's the goal then why not just do it directly and pass a law capping entity size?