3 ms·

> "Tech companies to be legally required to prevent this content from appearing in the first place, protecting users of all ages." The typical algorithmic impl

> "Tech companies to be legally required to prevent this content from appearing in the first place, protecting users of all ages." The typical algorithmic implementation would ban this HN discussion itself, for containing the string "self-harm" and various other keywords on the page. That's often how it ends up, for anyone who's been paying attention. Legitimate support websites are censored, for discussing the subjects the attempt to support. Public health experts get misclassified as disinformation—they use the same set of keywords, just in a different order. Inexpensive ML can't tell them apart. Important news could be automatically suppressed before anyone would even realize it's authentic news. How could one discuss on an algorithmically "safe" platform, for instance, the allegation that the President of the United States paid the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to rape an underage child, who later killed herself? That's four or five "high-priority" safety filters right there.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Sounds like a big tech problem then. Big tech has no responsibility and shall not be held accountable because their moderation is too shitty!
- perihelions 1y ago
  The problem is narrower and more nuanced than "held accountable": the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric. There's no incentives against algorithmically deleting good content by error. If you impose large financial and legal risk on one side (type I errors), and basically nothing on the other (type II), a public corporation will very rationally optimize for the incentives you've given them. That means: the cheapest possible moderation, with aggressive filters committing Type II errors all day. Look at how Microsoft GitHub consistently deletes innocent projects without warning, like SymPy, over LLM hallucinations. That moderation style's a direct consequence of the large financial costs of copyright lawsuits. If you introduce similar financial/legal risks in other areas, you should expect similar results.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - KaiserPro 1y ago
    > the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric very much so, large companies are not really held accountable for their user's actions, and thats pretty much by design, for example: If you hold a party every saturday, where the people that come along abuse residents in the streets and cause general damage, after the 5th or 6th time, and at about the point where the patrons of your parties are prosecuted, you will face legal penalties for letting it happen again. even if its different people at your party. (under a whole bunch of laws, ranging from asbos to breach of the peace to criminal damage, anti-rave laws, all sort.) If you do that online, as long as you comply with the bare minimum(ie handing over logs), you're free from most legal pain (unless its CSAM, copyrighted or "terrorist" material) I get your point, but thats where the we get into not a problem of the principle, but the execution. As its OFCOM who are doing the implementing, and they really don't have the expertise or leadership to make "good" guidance, we're going to end up with shit.
    - perihelions 1y ago
      Oh, the anti-rave laws were a textbook example of unintended consequences: they made it legally fraught to make life-saving harm minimization accessible, since the way the law was drafted, that'd confirm a rave host was "aware of the presence" of drugs—an element of the crime. Likely caused a net increase in drug-overdose deaths. Poorly-thought out, asymmetric incentives: strongly disincentivizes helping people not-die, while failing at disincentivizing creating an environment for easy access to hard drugs.
- ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
  What's your big plan to solve the problem? Pay a moderator? What if the moderator makes a mistake? What if it's unrealistic to pay a moderator? 500 hours of footage are uploaded to youtube every minute for instance. God knows how many facebook posts are made a minute. That's the problem with laws like these, obviously a company is going to air on the side of over censoring if the cost of making a mistake is an unknown. If your moderating. Law of large numbers being what it is, eventually if your platform is large enough something will slip through. And no one knows what the punishment will be or where the line even is.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    Repeal section 230

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Sounds like a big tech problem then. Big tech has no responsibility and shall not be held accountable because their moderation is too shitty!

perihelions 1y ago
The problem is narrower and more nuanced than "held accountable": the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric. There's no incentives against algorithmically deleting good content by error. If you impose large financial and legal risk on one side (type I errors), and basically nothing on the other (type II), a public corporation will very rationally optimize for the incentives you've given them. That means: the cheapest possible moderation, with aggressive filters committing Type II errors all day. Look at how Microsoft GitHub consistently deletes innocent projects without warning, like SymPy, over LLM hallucinations. That moderation style's a direct consequence of the large financial costs of copyright lawsuits. If you introduce similar financial/legal risks in other areas, you should expect similar results.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  > the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric very much so, large companies are not really held accountable for their user's actions, and thats pretty much by design, for example: If you hold a party every saturday, where the people that come along abuse residents in the streets and cause general damage, after the 5th or 6th time, and at about the point where the patrons of your parties are prosecuted, you will face legal penalties for letting it happen again. even if its different people at your party. (under a whole bunch of laws, ranging from asbos to breach of the peace to criminal damage, anti-rave laws, all sort.) If you do that online, as long as you comply with the bare minimum(ie handing over logs), you're free from most legal pain (unless its CSAM, copyrighted or "terrorist" material) I get your point, but thats where the we get into not a problem of the principle, but the execution. As its OFCOM who are doing the implementing, and they really don't have the expertise or leadership to make "good" guidance, we're going to end up with shit.
  - perihelions 1y ago
    Oh, the anti-rave laws were a textbook example of unintended consequences: they made it legally fraught to make life-saving harm minimization accessible, since the way the law was drafted, that'd confirm a rave host was "aware of the presence" of drugs—an element of the crime. Likely caused a net increase in drug-overdose deaths. Poorly-thought out, asymmetric incentives: strongly disincentivizes helping people not-die, while failing at disincentivizing creating an environment for easy access to hard drugs.
ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
What's your big plan to solve the problem? Pay a moderator? What if the moderator makes a mistake? What if it's unrealistic to pay a moderator? 500 hours of footage are uploaded to youtube every minute for instance. God knows how many facebook posts are made a minute. That's the problem with laws like these, obviously a company is going to air on the side of over censoring if the cost of making a mistake is an unknown. If your moderating. Law of large numbers being what it is, eventually if your platform is large enough something will slip through. And no one knows what the punishment will be or where the line even is.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Repeal section 230