[HN Gopher] Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some o...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its
rules
Author : tysone
Score : 839 points
Date : 2021-09-13 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| gootler wrote:
| Too many bots, that's the problem.
| mannanj wrote:
| I got banned yesterday for quoting a nazi official on propaganda:
|
| "Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by
| specifying the targets for hatred." - Joseph Goebbels
|
| Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks.
|
| Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their
| broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were
| associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in
| which another organization now decides you are dangerous and
| censors your presence from the internet independent of what you
| say.
| [deleted]
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I was banned from Facebook market place for selling a computer
| with a bad bitcoin joke in the description. Because the
| computer had an RTX3090 in it (surplus company PC) I wrote
| something like _" Good for making dinosaurs launder money for
| you if you're into mining"._
|
| Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous
| to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and
| extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful
| who your target is, as per your quote.
| bvhg3 wrote:
| I don't use facebook but HN has censored many of my comments
| over the years and shadow-banned multiple accounts. Information
| is dangerous.
| js2 wrote:
| FB's AI has no sense of humor. I got banned for 24 hours for
| this:
|
| https://ibb.co/ysFwkCY
|
| https://ibb.co/VjLZhPQ
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| The White House is giving direction on who to silence to FB.
|
| They've openly admitted and defended this.
|
| If you are still on FB you are a naive
| beezischillin wrote:
| Outside of the Facebook issue, can you ever really automate
| solutions for managing society-scale interactions while still
| being fair to people?
|
| If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but
| actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into
| corporate budgetary restrictions (you're not worth it but the
| celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod
| whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social
| and societal consequences of this?
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| The same is true of its advertisements. 'High-profile'
| organizations get freedom to literally spam you and the report
| action is meaningless.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
| others" Animal Farm - George Orwell
| sdrawkcabmai wrote:
| Facebook is the most explicitly duplicitious sociopathic
| company in the tech sector. Many companies are sociopathic,
| especially as you get into pure finance companies like PE
| firms, but few are as duplicitous as Facebook.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| That's why they're on my "wouldn't work for them if they wee
| the last tech company in the entire world" list. That list
| isn't long, but, FB is near the top of it.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Agreed, I'd rather go back to manual labor then feed that
| machine.
|
| I'd done manual labor before, it's sucks and the pay is
| low, but it sure beats selling your soul for a few
| greenbacks.
| paulluuk wrote:
| what other companies are on your list?
| lanstin wrote:
| Any company that is mainly paid for by advertising,
| especially if they seem to have big data/ML chops.
| tristor wrote:
| Agreed. I have a similar list, it's not super long, but
| most of the FAAMG are on it, and Facebook is #1 on the
| "will never" list. Everybody has a price, but some things
| are non-negotiable.
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.is/3fE10
| riofoxx wrote:
| T.o a.s.s.i.s.t y.o.u i.n t.r.a.d.e.s f.o.r b.e.t.t.e.r
| i.m.p.r.o.v.e.m.e.n.t on c.r.y.p.t.o.c.u.r.r.e.n.c.y
| W.h.a.t.s.A.p.p (+13052395906)
| Jasper_ wrote:
| "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human
| race is hard! And requires a lot of people"
|
| Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely
| strong-arm their way into _wanting_ to become the sole
| communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals
| and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging
| markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and
| basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian
| government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until
| backlashed pushed them out.
|
| If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human
| communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they
| themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-
| at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the
| consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by
| accident.
|
| I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination,
| achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when
| you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get
| the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't
| know that going in...
| nindalf wrote:
| > "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human
| race is hard! And requires a lot of people"
|
| Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've
| constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
|
| > I can't feel pity
|
| No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in
| which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will
| fail in the future, hopefully less.
|
| I feel like you really wanted to get all of this off your chest
| and then replied to me because the comment was high up.
| dataflow wrote:
| >> "Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire
| human race is hard! And requires a lot of people"
|
| > Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've
| constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
|
| Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they
| were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:
|
| >> "With time I learned that any system that's meant to work
| for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to
| be papered over."
| Jasper_ wrote:
| I read your comment a bit like a defense of Facebook, saying
| "you know, when you scale to millions of people, it's really
| hard and expensive! Cut them a bit of slack"
|
| I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale
| to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were
| the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their
| moderation systems were ready.
|
| For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping
| to fix the system.
| danielrpa wrote:
| And the size of this problem, managing the entire human race,
| is part of why they make so much money. They are in front of a
| lot of people and extracting value from them.
|
| So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying
| the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring
| some benefits to people, it also does a _lot_ of harm, to the
| point that I 'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or
| even if it's possible to have a net positive company in this
| space).
| civilized wrote:
| Privatize gains, socialize losses: not just for the finance
| industry!
| docmars wrote:
| Not to mention, imagine the hubris necessary to want this as a
| company, and consider oneself the sole (or few of) moderator of
| human communication to police and curate absolutely everything
| that gets shared, according to a single prescribed narrative by
| their political partners, and their team of fact checkers
| complete with their implicit biases, who are funded by extreme
| partisan players who won the Elite Olympics(tm) with their
| nearly infinite wealth and sway.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with
| a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the
| market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that
| sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I can't blame them though. Networks of any kind have the
| particular effect of working the better, the more people
| are on it. What use is a messenger ( _cough_ Signal,
| Threema) if none of your contacts use them and can be
| persuaded to install yet-another-network app?
|
| The obvious solution would have been for governments to
| mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early
| on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are
| dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less
| "API"...
| jjeaff wrote:
| I actually don't think it is that rare. Especially for
| smaller companies. I don't want 100% of the market. I want
| 10%, but I want the best 20% that can easily afford my
| product and doesn't complain, cancel, chargeback, or need
| unnecessary handholding to use my software. Beyond that
| it's mostly diminishing returns.
|
| Of course, I actually have a product that people want to
| pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to
| fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the
| market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from
| using it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I enjoy working for a company that realizes we'll never
| have the entire market and is fine with the fact that there
| is plenty of space for multiple competitors to do well.
|
| I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win
| all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where
| that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but
| it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.
| chongli wrote:
| That's not true at all. Plenty of people run lifestyle
| businesses whose goal is to support themselves and their
| families, friends, and employees. One example is Aquarium
| Co-Op [1] who is into promoting the aquarium hobby in all
| its facets. Cory, the owner, is very frank about the costs
| of running his business and how he often sells products at
| or below cost because he believes they're important to the
| community. A far cry from big tech companies seemingly bent
| on world domination.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Aquariumcoop
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think that's excellent and I wish Cory the best.
| Cragislist is another example I can think of where a
| company just set out to be small and charge what it
| needed to make its small employee-base comfortable, not
| dominate the world.
|
| ... but then I'm out of names, is my point. _Most_
| companies don 't go this road. Perhaps that's because
| going the other road gathers enough resources to be big
| enough to make all the headlines, so we don't hear about
| the others.
| chongli wrote:
| I think you're generally going to run out if you try to
| think of household names. Instead, think local. I don't
| know about you but there are a lot of local family-run
| restaurants, bakeries, chocolatiers, furniture/carpentry
| stores, flower shops, consulting businesses,
| accounting/tax prep firms, game/hobby stores, boardgame
| cafes, independent movie theatres, etc. On and on the
| list goes, though unless you live here (Waterloo) you've
| probably never heard of any of them. And of course where
| I live is not special; you can find a similar variety in
| any city and even many towns or villages.
| specialist wrote:
| VC-funded corporations are more inclined towards world
| domination than co-ops.
| roughly wrote:
| That's because they don't have to pay for externalities. If
| Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially,
| for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn't be
| viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to
| operate at that scale). It's only because they can dump the
| waste products of their enterprise into our collective
| psychological water supply without consequence that it
| appears like a profitable business.
| [deleted]
| Manuel_D wrote:
| How do you quantify externalities of media? Do NYT and
| other progressive outlets share responsibility for
| looting during summer 2020 because they largely shared
| the views of demonstrators? If climate change anxiety is
| shown to be a large factor in psychological issues, do
| outlets covering climate change get held responsible for
| that psychological consequence?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't fulminate on HN or take threads on generic-
| indignant tangents. Those are much less interesting and usually
| turn nasty. Substantive critique is welcome, but if you reply
| to a comment you should really be replying to something
| specific in that comment, and you definitely shouldn't be
| blasting the other user.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.
| [deleted]
| GDC7 wrote:
| Facebook is used by 3B people.
|
| When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so
| big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in
| the layer that it services.
|
| In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the
| massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.
|
| Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe
| can.
|
| It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.
| nullstyle wrote:
| It is, but it's wrong.
| vokep wrote:
| Then the fact anything is would be wrong, which if believed
| truly leads the only reasonable behavior to be the most
| destructive behavior (what is, existence, is bad, so
| destroying it is good).
|
| Luckily, its good.
| nullstyle wrote:
| That's nonsense
| xtat wrote:
| Hearkens oligopoly when only the already powerful can talk. Baby
| steps.
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| This tracks with their other choices and behaviors,
| unfortunately.
| hcrisp wrote:
| > At least some of the documents have been turned over to the
| Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person
| seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people
| familiar with the matter.
|
| The story-within-the-story here is that there is a FB
| whistleblower who wanted to bring this to light, not unlike other
| high-profile cases involving government surveillance. It amazes
| me that one person can wield more power than scores of seasoned
| journalists.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Am I right to think of it more as a partnership? It does take
| at least one person with insider knowledge and access.
| Otherwise, the reporting would lack the backing documents that
| brings it credibility. And companies seem to be rather opaque
| to purely outside sources.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| This should have been obvious during the election when trump
| clearly violated the "don't mislead the public about how
| elections work" when he claimed that postal votes are what ever
| it is he said it was.
|
| That is a clear ban. It says so in the "community guidelines"
|
| (side note, you should really read the community guidelines, they
| are a great set of rules for keeping a community vibrant and
| happy, assuming they are enforced....)
|
| I can see why facebook did it, you don't want to obviously piss
| off a capricious party with the power to fuck with your bottom
| line. It doesn't make it any better.
| egypsy31 wrote:
| Sean Hannity promoted gun sales on his FB. When reported they
| said it did not violate their rules. When appealed they upheld
| that original decision. He was given an exemption. Now I get it.
| 8b16380d wrote:
| Is this really surprising? I have always assumed bad faith.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| No but now we have proof.
| NullPtrEx wrote:
| I mean... we all already knew this
| CreateAccntAgn wrote:
| If these are known misleading public statements then can SEC
| prosecute them? I'd think these statements can affect the stock
| price and this is securities fraud.
| hajile wrote:
| I'm guessing you have just met "prosecutorial discretion" for
| the first time. Prosecutors have to power to never bring
| charges against their friends and allies with basically zero
| risk.
|
| Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA
| (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than
| recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.
|
| It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx
| still has her job.
|
| Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost
| always entirely overlooked.
|
| Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand
| juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the
| jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating
| evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.
|
| A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish
| opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The
| whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is
| more equal (or simply done away with).
| elliekelly wrote:
| They would likely raise a "mere puffery" defense. Our legal
| system recognizes that in the course of business people will
| inevitably lie. At least a little. And so puffery, as a matter
| of law, is immaterial.
|
| The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic
| circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a
| practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits
| alleging securities fraud.
|
| Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes'
| defense:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...
| nradov wrote:
| The SEC doesn't conduct criminal prosecutions. They can only
| bring civil actions for securities law violations. If they do
| find evidence of criminality they pass it to the Justice
| Department for possible prosecution.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| > Those included in the XCheck program, according to Facebook
| documents, include, in top row: Neymar, Donald Trump, Donald
| Trump, Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg, and in bottom row, Elizabeth
| Warren, Dan Scavino, Candace Owens and Doug the Pug.
| winternett wrote:
| This is the reality of our new modern world that spans far beyond
| Facebook.
|
| It is the popular, chosen, and paying that succeed on a
| dramatically increasing level, bolstered online by code and
| algorithms. This is how ideological and sales monopoly is
| bolstered and protected with promotion, paywalls, and glass
| ceilings.
|
| It is no wonder why wealth inequality is surging worldwide as
| it's becoming more impossible to find wealth for everyone but
| those chosen and those in control...
|
| The very minute Facebook and Twitter changed timelines to non-
| linear formats, and when Reddit began to hide downvotes, the ruse
| began... I subconsciously doubt that we can really trust
| analytics properly anymore to be honest, because there now always
| seems to be a hidden agenda in IT now to suit a specific purpose
| like profit, messaging, promotion, or subversion.
|
| I'm no crusader, but the ideal that anyone can find success on
| their own merits and hard work is a lie in the digital world
| especially now, and a lot of the people that look like successful
| business minds are in reality just wealthy starters that are
| losing money they started out with while "portraying themselves"
| as successful and self made...
|
| The few platform providers/controllers are the only ones making
| new money, this is why they have so much disposable cash that
| they spend on wasteful things like flying penis shaped objects
| outside of the atmosphere, and on failed ideas like triangular
| shaped pick up trucks...
|
| Talent, wisdom, track-record, and accomplishment are being
| overlooked for Sensationalism, wealth, and popularity at an all
| time high in my opinion... This unreasonable and harmful
| hypocrisy is a critically bad trend that is being promoted, made
| popular, and deceptively normalized by social media sites as
| engineered hype.
|
| No wonder why it's driving people to do bad things to hop onto
| the popularity train... :/
| pueblito wrote:
| > At least some of the documents have been turned over to the
| Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person
| seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people
| familiar with the matter.
|
| Why the SEC?
| ilikejam wrote:
| Because everything everywhere is securities fraud.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
| 5faulker wrote:
| Managing a large-scale community is not easy. The rules are still
| evolving and AI have not taken control over the world, so we'll
| see.
| xwdv wrote:
| Unfortunately Facebook has no choice. If you do not make your
| platform appealing for popular people you will have a hard time
| attracting their followers there.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That is a textbook example of a choice.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| And of a false dichotomy.
| pnemonic wrote:
| How unfortunate it is that such a thing is seen as a "rock and
| a hard place". Making less money might just be the worst thing
| possible for a corporation like Facebook.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The thing about what Facebook is doing is that it may be
| impossible. And if it's not impossible, it may be a profoundly
| bad idea.
|
| Facebook is trying to build a social network with 100% reach and
| a userbase beholden to a globally uniform set of rules (where
| possible; the laws of individual nations will forever intervene).
| This is not something that has ever succeeded. We don't actually
| know, apriori, whether you can govern the whole of humanity under
| one set of norms. It's never been done.
|
| It's possible it fundamentally _can 't_ be done... That the end
| result of this experiment is that Facebook fractures and ends up
| either having to vend multiple views of its userbase with
| different rules (like Reddit) or has a large chunk of the human
| populace it can never get on-board. But we should keep in mind
| what the goal _is._
| [deleted]
| throwaway224466 wrote:
| In other words, a feature that makes sure posts from useful
| idiots with lots of followers on the left are never accidentally
| censored.
|
| I'm sure they also have the opposite version of this tool built
| to more quickly censor posts from high-profile users on the
| right.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show
| nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of
| millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook.
| Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook's
| fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly,
| that Hillary Clinton had covered up "pedophile rings," and that
| then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking
| asylum "animals," according to the documents.
|
| [...]
|
| > While the program included most government officials, it didn't
| include all candidates for public office, at times effectively
| granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers.
| The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the
| documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject
| to accusations of favoritism.
|
| [...]
|
| > In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system
| faced no subsequent review, the documents show.
|
| [...]
|
| > In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to
| retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile
| accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it
| classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to
| its algorithms to avoid political fallout.
|
| This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of
| American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic
| element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations,
| the past several years have shown us the extreme power of
| misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole.
|
| Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is
| astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on
| elections by selectively including candidates is a huge
| disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs
| to be held accountable.
|
| ---
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...
| yann2 wrote:
| The elite use facebook?
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Signal or custom forks for personal communications.
| nradov wrote:
| The elite have personal assistants and social media managers
| who use Facebook on their behalf for brand building and PR.
| napolux wrote:
| This is a very good question. What if I'm an Hollywood
| superstar or an NBA player or a billionaire and I want to chat
| and share stuff privately with my "colleagues".
|
| Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see
| "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do
| they share in their day to day life?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| They use aliases and keep a small friends list. They don't
| typically post photos.
|
| I still suspect that method is imperfect since your account
| may be locked and you may need to associate a burner number
| to it.
| gilj wrote:
| Ask yourself what you would use if you didn't want the
| general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see
| it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use
| the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just
| use direct messaging apps.
| adolph wrote:
| _Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican
| presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor,
| is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that
| uses the moniker "Pierre Delecto."_
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-
| del...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I liked that, you FINALLY got a taste of the Real Romney.
|
| I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before,
| during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have
| never in my life been in the company of people so removed
| from the everyday working man while being waited on by
| them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on
| with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Elite in the title might make you think they mean a politician or
| celebrity. It's really Facebook outsourcing to "XCheck" who has
| 5.8 million memebers and somehow avoids Facebook's "moderation".
| balozi wrote:
| Technically, all these users are getting Facebook services for
| free. Is the complaint here that some people are receiving lesser
| free services than other people's free services?
|
| If that's the case then we need to look at the value of said free
| services.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| It is extremely distressing that a few companies, all located in
| the same country, and many located in the same state, if not
| quite the same city, run by a few men with similar politics has
| the immense power that they do.
|
| Some people do not quite understand why.
|
| Imagine in they were all Russian and owned by friends of Putin.
|
| It should be a matter of national security for other nations to
| develop regional competitors. It should also be in the inrest of
| the US to have more internal competition.
|
| This is not easy.
|
| Making Facebook 3.0 is not the problem, though running at
| Facebook scale is a challenge.
|
| It is how to get users to adopt it. As has been the problem for
| US upstarts as well.
|
| Thankfully a lot of younger people want other social network
| platforms than Facebook, but it is a bit pointless when the
| owners of the new networks are the same people who own the old
| ones.
|
| I guess TikTok proves it can be done. It also proved how upset US
| social media gets when competition knocks on their doors.
|
| China, by locking out competition, developed products that are
| used domestically. There are drawbacks and negative effects of
| that as well.
|
| I dont know how big VK is in Russia.
|
| Ideally Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram would be
| broken into 250 or so different companies spread out among
| different nations and regions.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| If you zoom out, it's not especially concerning.
|
| The history of media companies suggests all of these companies
| will become less influential in little time. A few people used
| to own radio stations. Then it was TV stations. Overlapping
| them was newspapers/magazines. Things come and go, they tend to
| concentrate power, but they don't seem to last very long.
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are young. There is
| little indication they'll have much influence in 20 years.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| They won't get broken up because western govs want to compete
| with China and have similar control while still being able to
| fly under the freedom flag. FB is a virtual China, "soft
| authoritarianism" basically.
| Jensson wrote:
| They will get regulated by governments though, there is no
| reason those companies should have that kind of power.
| varelse wrote:
| This is the culture Tech VC encourages so this is the culture we
| all get. SSND no?
| donatj wrote:
| I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported
| videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been
| told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser"
| and got a week long ban.
| josefresco wrote:
| My wife (an American) also got flagged for saying "Americans
| are selfish". She then made a post about our RV (camper) asking
| about sewer "hook ups" at a campground and was flagged for
| posting what looked like a sex ad.
|
| We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".
| q1w2 wrote:
| "hate speech" has become so watered down.
| adolph wrote:
| > asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground
|
| No lie, that is dirty talk.
| bambax wrote:
| > _We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech
| Mom"._
|
| Hook-up mom would be better.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Especially after Jan 6, there are a couple of things you can
| say in an ordinary spirited political debate that will cop
| you a ban on FB. One is several flavors of "Americans are X,"
| another is variants on "Kill the filibuster" (which I assume
| is pattern-matching to '[violence-word] the [congress-word],
| which they probably up-sampled in the threat modeling for,
| uh, obvious reasons).
| josefresco wrote:
| The worse part is that in her eagerness to close the
| "prompt" on her phone she "agreed" she had posted this
| content (instead of appeal), which probably put some sort
| of permanent mark on her record. One can only hope she gets
| kicked off for good one of these days!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| wtf?? I haven't been on FB for about 10 years now and
| every now and then a comment like this comes along which
| makes me realize just how out of touch with the global
| bureaucracy I've become
| himinlomax wrote:
| I got a 48h ban for calling the Japanese military "the japs" in
| the context of the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to offend the
| group that raped and murdered millions now, would we?
|
| A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term
| for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a
| century ago.
| tjpnz wrote:
| This is also the same company that allowed a terrorist to
| livestream a killing spree for 17 minutes despite it being
| reported over and over again. To add insult to injury they
| allowed copies of the same footage to proliferate across their
| platform for weeks.
|
| Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and
| how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it
| actually worked.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I suspect it is automated. A computer can easily flag calling
| someone a loser. Not sure if FB has burning animals as a
| automated flag yet.
| donatj wrote:
| I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two
| days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the
| second round a human reviewed it.
|
| From the support response:
|
| > The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one
| of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing
| by letting us know about it.
|
| Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry
| around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
| [deleted]
| isk517 wrote:
| Anyone want to bet that when some major news publication
| does a story about how these types of videos are being
| spread on Facebook they announce that they go against their
| community standards and that the company had no idea this
| is going on.
| bambax wrote:
| Content policy is just like airport security: a theater.
| You cannot take a bottle of water on board a plane, but you
| can take a laptop with enormous batteries. In my experience
| it's much easier to set lithium batteries on fire, than
| water. But what do I know.
| junon wrote:
| > Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things
| scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community
| Standards.
|
| Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who
| do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that
| would spend resources on that even though this is a well
| known pre-cursor to homicide.
|
| Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be
| able to literally torture animals and face little to no
| repercussions, and get tons of clout and maybe even some
| money (ad revenue or whatever) in the process.
| bambax wrote:
| The problem with animal cruelty is that modern industrial
| animal farming is torture, and torture of the worst kind.
| So it's diffucult to draw the line without angering
| powerful groups and rich advertisers.
| junon wrote:
| > and torture of the worst kind.
|
| Not always, depends on where you are. Being set on fire
| is probably not better than the conditions of industral
| farms. Let's be realistic.
| bambax wrote:
| A squirrel that lives freely in nature and is once set on
| fire, that it will likely survive (and even if not) has a
| better life than a sow in a cage indoors where it can't
| move, is constantly pregnant and crushes its own babies
| because there is no space.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Most crimes, even if reported, are not meaningfully
| investigated. I am not sure that is really society
| failing. Society is still better on that than ever
| before.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Yes. Precisely. I think it is because the community of
| squirrels have no ability to retaliate. If we observe the
| trend, the pull down are proportionate to the strength of
| the retaliators. Being against say LGBT isn't the same as
| being anti christian. Hit a particular group of people or
| ideology, the bans are well automated at this point.
| adolph wrote:
| > the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate
|
| Tell that to my garden.
|
| (I don't condone messing with wildlife in any way.
| However, I would like my arugula to grow up not behind
| bars.)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Why can't users moderate the post so that Facebook does know
| about the animal torture? -5 Animal Torture
| chefandy wrote:
| Some of the actions are automated based on some NN algorithm
| score, and then the appeals are human-powered. They have
| large third party content review offices that are operated
| like call centers in which humans review these things. I
| understand they're real meat grinders to work in.
|
| I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and
| had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards.
| I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing
| people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of
| people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up
| their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the
| success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I
| can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated
| problems with this process.
| smcl wrote:
| Yeah I gave up reporting. I've reported some people being
| extremely racist in comments, no action in either case. It's
| either moderated by racist people, some poor AI or
| "rand()%2==0"
| gjs278 wrote:
| why does it bother you so much
| radu_floricica wrote:
| This is actually discouraging non-brigades from reporting. I
| reported obviously spam accounts and got the same feedback
| after a few weeks. Now I don't bother.
|
| Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the
| numbers.
| tonfreed wrote:
| Same, I've reported a ton of death threats only to be told
| they're not in violation. Only for my mum to cop an autoban for
| calling someone a spring chicken.
|
| Their moderation is a complete joke.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I once made fun of Justin Bieber(said he acts like a baby) on
| IG, and got a warning. Some guy threatened to Hunt me and my
| family, kill us and do bad things to our bodies and IG said it
| didn't violate any rules, when I reported it. My account can
| now not even post the word "chump" without warnings. Talk about
| backwards.
|
| It's very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG
| when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until
| they get the whip from some governments.
| vernie wrote:
| And Bieber himself said "I was like baby, baby, baby oh", so
| it's not like your were saying anything controversial.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| I don't want to do victim blaming or shaming here but why
| would you use any fb product knowing well about their awful
| business practices like these?
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Fair and valid question. I got rid of Facebook over a year
| ago but still use IG, but I cringe when I do.
|
| Sadly I'm happy I left Facebook but I will admit I've
| missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives.
| A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away
| and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a
| fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a
| last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing
| out on.
|
| I'll still maintain I'm happy with my departure, but it has
| its drawbacks unfortunately.
|
| Double edged sword indeed.
| reayn wrote:
| I've been a social media hermit for basically my entire
| life so far but folded in and installed IG a couple weeks
| ago once I entered university. It's sadly just the norm.
| Telling someone my age to "just not use social media"
| seems like a boomer's shriek, and almost every club or
| association manages does all its' event coordination and
| stuff over IG.
|
| It's extremely hard to get by, keep up with people, or
| even make friends without it.
|
| The same could also be said for Discord as well, which
| I've seen over the past 4-5 years grow from a gamer-
| exclusive chat platform to what is probably the #1 choice
| for students nowadays for group interactions.
|
| As far as we've come though I still think these kinds of
| things are still in their infancy when it comes to their
| impact on us as a society, so I guess the best thing to
| do is just wait and see what happens.
| CiPHPerCoder wrote:
| I maintain an account only so nobody can impersonate me to
| others.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Ditto. Squatting my own identity.
| annadane wrote:
| Because they employ blitzkrieg tactics that nobody should
| be able to get away with and by the time we notice it's too
| late to change our consumption habits
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Because of its network effect. Removing facebook, in a way
| is removing members of our connection circles.
| asdff wrote:
| Might be an unpopular opinion but if you have a
| connection that exists only via social media and not at
| least via phone calling or some other more personal forms
| of communication too, its not much of a real connection.
| jedberg wrote:
| I wish I had time to text and call every one of my
| friends, but sadly I just don't. Facebook is perfect
| because I can post there and all my friends see it
| without me having to call or text every one of them the
| same story.
|
| Then when we _do_ get a chance to meet up, we can skip
| right to the discussion of the thing instead of me first
| having to tell the story.
|
| Especially since some of my friends live very far away
| and have very busy jobs so we only see each other every
| few years, but this way I can still keep up on their
| lives and they on mine.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > removing members of our connection circles
|
| Does it really? Whatever happened to just a friendly
| weekly email?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It got replaced by social media
| brodouevencode wrote:
| It did, but did it ever _have_ to be?
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Nothing ever _has_ to happen; that implies intent in
| markets.
|
| Efficiencies and user experience are better for more
| users on social media than email, despite it's obvious
| flaws.
|
| Did regional steel mills _have_ to replace local
| blacksmiths? No, but they did.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| If you where sent into the year 2000 with a mission to
| prevent the adoption of social media and instead maintain
| Email's dominance, what would you do?
| astura wrote:
| Nobody checks their email anymore.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| I have not received a friendly email in more than a
| decade. It's all on social media unless it's work or
| spam.
| corobo wrote:
| I'm in my 30s and a friendly email (from a person not
| relating to business) has never existed in my life haha
|
| Man I'd love it if I could communicate socially via
| email, nobody I know would go for it
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Honest question: have you tried writing first? I
| communicate with a few people via email every few months.
| It might start with a forwarded email, or just a quick
| how-do-you-do, then it deepens into long multi-paragraph
| replies over the course of days. Being able to sit down
| to write and rewrite what's been going on without someone
| watching the little typing bubble means I can get more
| in-depth with how I've been feeling. I would give it a
| shot. Try sending people a quick email. If they never
| reply, no biggie. If they do, you may be surprised at the
| result.
| corobo wrote:
| I would feel kinda silly asking for someone's email
| address over a chat messenger, but you are correct
| there's no attempt my side either. "nobody would go for
| it" is an assumption on my part
|
| I'll make a point to give it a go :)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I have no overlap between people I know IRL and people I
| know on SM. They are wholly separate worlds. If I know
| them IRL, it's text and email - never ever SM.
|
| For me, the point of SM is burnable bridges. It's a place
| to take risks and later apply the lessons to meatspace.
| In spite of that, I've cultivated many lasting online
| relationships but I can't see myself ever meeting any of
| them in person.
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| SM?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I recently asked a ~20 year old to stay in contact via
| mail (as I don't have IG or FB) and just got a 'lol'. So
| this mostly disappeared.
|
| (I have one friend I send mails to occasionally, though)
| atkailash wrote:
| I was in Facebook jail for "bullying" someone when I took his
| exact phrasing, changed relevant details and applied it to him.
|
| I reported 9 comments misgendering a trans person and none of
| them were considered against community standards, supposedly.
|
| It's ridiculous
| KaiserPro wrote:
| simple: if you are important, then you get a moderator.
|
| If you are a pleb, its up to the AI. so unless that video has
| been fingerprinted, then it'll be approved.
|
| if the sentiment analysis AI says you were being abusive: ban.
| if you appeal (if you can) it might, perhaps 1/100,00 times be
| looked at by a human
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said
| criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system "was
| designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so
| we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require
| more understanding."
|
| Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately
| enforced policies.
| dado3212 wrote:
| This kind of makes sense. For every high profile person posting
| an ML-flagged "Napalm Girl" in the context of discussion around
| the Vietnam war, there's thousands of instances of real child
| porn.
| antonzabirko wrote:
| Well of course. Why wouldn't they? Money and friends aside, they
| _have_ to do it for people who wield power like China 's upper
| echelon or the NSA. If they say no, they will be shut down in
| those markets.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| Facebook is already shut down in China, I'm not sure what you
| mean.
| antonzabirko wrote:
| Then to put it more simply, large companies must tow to
| influential requests because that influence determines the
| flow of money. Govt, private, or individual -- doesn't
| matter.
|
| And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's
| partially blocked and working on a censorship project to
| reinstate itself there.
| dogleash wrote:
| >"We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly," said the
| confidential review.
|
| Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate
| messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy?
| Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Further, why do we continue to accept the fiction that rules
| and laws apply to the elite as for the masses? Even the not-so-
| elite, the Stanford swimmer who brutally raped and assaulted
| Chanel Miller, though convicted, was given light sentence
| because of his "bright future", according to the judge.
| ithacaman wrote:
| There are quite a few people who really, really want the
| caste system implemented in the US. Extreme class disparity
| embedded into our justice system. We understate these efforts
| at our peril.
| Cullinet wrote:
| replying to cratermoon as a English born nearly retired child
| of a now almost entirely American family, whose parents
| totalled 100 years of life and was taught to program and
| think by my uncle who would be 121 years old if alive and who
| worked intimately with with the American war command, I have
| no answer to your question other than that is the defining of
| the American Way to believe that the rules apply for all of
| us equally. The definition of 20th century British nature is
| to be the inbred product of generations of ancestors who
| never doubted the rules for the privileged are not even
| comparable to those for the populace.
|
| I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a
| investment linked naturalisation process, but the development
| in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me
| that I would be committed to doing everything possible to
| reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of
| moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of
| the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Is there anyone walking around that actually believes that
| rules and laws apply to the elite?
|
| Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because
| (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they
| they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake.
| I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than
| me seem to think so.
| fallingknife wrote:
| A simpler explanation would be that it's just the way it
| works in every human society ever.
| pempem wrote:
| Maybe we could consider it an easier explanation rather
| than a simple one. It seems like splitting hairs but its
| important
|
| The rule of law however has been continuously pursued
| across centuries and different societies in an attempt to
| subvert this 'default' operating mechanism.
|
| I would argue the nature bit is where you favor yourself.
| Its hard to find people who will disfavor themselves in
| the name of egalitarianism.
|
| The rest is the result of resources/funds being
| concentrated in the hands of people who also end up with
| power due to said resources/funds.
| isk517 wrote:
| Depends on the rules and laws. The system tends to be very
| good at punishing rich people that swindle money from other
| rich people.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > The system tends to be very good at punishing rich
| people that swindle money from other rich people.
|
| ... Eventually? I'm surely not the only one who thinks of
| Madoff first, and he got away with it for almost a decade
| after suspicions were first reported.
| isk517 wrote:
| Madoff got 150 years once he was convicted, though you
| are correct, I probably should have stated that the
| system is very good at punishing rich people that are
| CAUGHT swindling other rich people.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Ah, but Madoff was also making money for other rich
| people, so the system took some time to decide what to
| do.
| taylodl wrote:
| In other words, when the elite are impacted the full
| force of law will be brought to bear on the perpetrator
| of the injustice. This used to be called aristocracy.
| We've spent the past 250 years pretending it doesn't
| exist here in the States.
| colpabar wrote:
| I find it funny how we use phrases like "Russian
| oligarchs" all the time without batting an eye, but we
| never use them when referring to the Bushes or the
| Clintons in the US.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The power resides in generational wealth not some
| commoners who got lucky. These people don't need to hold
| elected office because they can buy whatever they want,
| including manipulating government in their favor.
| hoseja wrote:
| Nobility is specifically included from Forbes wealthiest
| list. They really don't want to draw attention.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The Clintons and Bushes are not really oligarchs. They
| represent a monarchy maybe of inherited wealth and
| status.
|
| Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are
| better examples of oligarchs because they managed to
| create their own wealth and with that obtained political
| clout.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I take that politicians are more of useful tools. Not the
| people who have any real power or wealth.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > they managed to create their own wealth
|
| Haha, there's that fiction. See how deeply it pervades
| all thinking about power and success in the US?
| JadeNB wrote:
| There's a minor genre of imagining US journalism
| standards for world reporting applied to reporting on the
| US: https://slate.com/tag/if-it-happened-there
| r00fus wrote:
| It's a convenient fiction the rich/elite propagate through
| funding stupid plot lines in books/TV/movies while hiding
| that the elite get off scott-free and later expunge the
| records.
|
| Convenient because it allows the state to continue to pass
| more and more draconian laws that prevent any change to the
| status quo in which the rich get richer and poor are
| further dehumanized.
| yunohn wrote:
| I often debate this with HNers, so yes, there are quite a
| few that believe the world is perfectly fair, more so in
| "democratic" countries.
| hackerbob wrote:
| Yeah I wonder why this is. Perhaps misplaced idealism of
| human nature and authority. The Judge, CEO, or the
| Journalist despite their lofty titles are human too and
| can be influenced by others. They also are not immune to
| their own personal desires and biases as well.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Yes. Donald Trump was impeached twice and has an unknown
| number of civil and criminal investigations ongoing. If a
| billionaire and the leader of a major political party is in
| this much trouble, it kind of shows that elites do get in
| trouble.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ongoing, not completed. However a lot of his less
| privileged associates were actually convicted.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Impeachment + acquittal and open trials aren't
| punishment. They are the very opposite - they show how we
| make a show of justice for the elites, while doing
| nothing practical. I can promise you that nothing
| substantial will come of all these trials - he will at
| the very worse have to pay some small percentage of his
| huge fortune.
| ThrowAway145 wrote:
| Trump is an extreme example. He basically did everything
| he could to get himself into trouble. He operated as a
| troll essentially and instigated the public on Twitter,
| followed by an attempt to overthrow the government.
|
| If we looked at normal and even favorable politicians
| like Nancy Pelosi or President Biden, we might find
| something worth investigating as well but has gotten
| swept under the rug.
|
| Punishing politicians in itself can be political even...
| cratermoon wrote:
| Oh but that's part of the fiction and the rigging. If he
| were a poor non-white person, he'd have been in prison
| for the last 30+ years, or after whenever his first
| swindle and self-aggrandizing fraud happened.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Another way to look at it is that an elite mired in so
| much corruption and antisocial behavior was rewarded by
| being elected POTUS and allowed to finish his term and
| orchestrate an insurrection without consequence.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And this is why I believe law should be truly blind. Any
| details such as race, gender, sex, education, political
| leaning in cases should be hidden and only public prosecution
| and defenders be allowed. We could easily handle whole
| process via text.
| rovolo wrote:
| "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor
| alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal
| loaves of bread."
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France
| crackercrews wrote:
| He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the
| judge was following the recommendation of the probation
| department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own.
|
| 1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-
| release-j...
| bdowling wrote:
| Don't let the facts get in the way of a good outrage.
| clairity wrote:
| as the principal adjudicator, the judge can't be absolved
| of his responsibility by pointing to advisories. that the
| probationers were biased in their recommendation doesn't
| absolve him of his own biased judgment, and whether he's
| actually biased or not is a matter of the totality of his
| judicial record, not just this case.
| throwaway91321 wrote:
| This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally
| I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a
| lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases
| where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading
| down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed
| up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases
| where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't
| seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown
| at them.
|
| I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than
| anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in
| America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries
| - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence,
| while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless
| they forfeit their right to defend themselves.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > a string of prior cases where they were let off with
| almost no punishment
|
| Ever tried to get a job with a string of convictions? The
| criminal justice system in the US doesn't need to imprison
| a person for them to be punished.
| Aunche wrote:
| Brock Turner wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance
| into Stanford, which had been revoked. His father was an
| electrical engineer and his mom was a nurse.
|
| Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| A white male All-American athlete attending arguably
| America's most prestigious university isn't elite?
| SamBam wrote:
| GP referred to "not-so-elite." In this case, the small bit
| of "eliteness" would be white, male, athlete (All-
| American), upper middle class, accepted into a good
| college.
|
| And that's probably enough to justify saying he has a
| "bright future," in this country and day and age.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That's white, male, athlete, upper middle class, accepted
| into a good college, living in America.
|
| From a global perspective, the eliteness is far more than
| a "small bit".
| SamBam wrote:
| Sure, but in this case we're comparing the treatment (by
| courts, etc) of the elite vs non-elite in America.
| cratermoon wrote:
| There are peculiarities of eliteness in America that
| matter here. Because Americans maintain the fiction of a
| classless society and don't have the legal framework of a
| caste system, what counts as elite in America affects how
| the world views American elites, and how Americans view
| elites in other cultures. We don't for example, care how
| many cows in a bride's dowry.
| adventured wrote:
| > Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless
| society
|
| There is _nobody_ in the US that believes US society is
| classless. Talk about fictions.
|
| Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class
| segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of
| Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in
| the country defines themselves by such structures?
| Americans are taught the class structures all throughout
| school. Americans are informed about the class structures
| 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC
| and everything inbetween.
|
| The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of
| US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping
| the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had
| hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here
| has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our
| history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's
| omnipresent as a thing.
|
| Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor,
| there were the land barons and British lords, farmers,
| agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the
| US by the conquering European empires. The class systems
| here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are
| fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US
| society.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The fiction is that there's class mobility. That's part
| of why others commenting here have tilted towards
| minimizing the eliteness of a criminal convicted of
| sexual assault: they want to think that his "hard work"
| landed him where he is and that they, too, might
| accomplish as much once they grasp their own bootstraps.
| filoleg wrote:
| The number of cows in a bride's dowry is just a
| straightforward proxy for wealth, and that's pretty
| universal.
|
| Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the
| reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or
| the car driven by the individual. I know that some people
| compete in who can afford to spend the most money on
| their wedding too.
|
| All of these are literally just another way of
| quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of
| whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend
| all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how
| this is somehow unique to the US at all.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Can you imagine a judge in the US letting someone
| convicted of sexual assault off with a light sentence
| because he has a lot of cows? The point is that the
| elitism is not just relative to other Americans, but to
| the rest of the world.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| > wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into
| Stanford
|
| Pardon my rudeness, but if that's the only thing someone
| sees as elite, I'd suggest that the person's own elite
| status is just a notch below them.
| gkop wrote:
| > All-American swimmer
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
| mix/wp/2016/03/3...
|
| Athletics are another sense in which he was elite.
| uselesscynicism wrote:
| I thought the whole point of them complaining about
| "rules for thee, not for me" and "the elite" were class
| complaints, but now the goalposts are moved and so anyone
| who excels at anything is part of "the elite"?
|
| Yes, I suppose the kulaks were members of the bourgeoisie
| after all, for they had skills, and skills are capital,
| and thus they are part of the oppressor class -- the
| elite.
|
| Indeed, his mother, a nurse, and his father, as an
| engineer, both possessed intellectual capital and are
| thus counterrevolutionaries.
|
| Just to be clear: the above is somewhat tongue in cheek
| and obviously nothing about the boy's background should
| be relevant in a violent crime case, and his was
| particularly disgusting.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Seriously, top athletes live on another planet in
| University. I remember working at the UT-Austin textbook
| store in my 20s and while everyone else had to find what
| they needed on their own, the football team had special
| permits they could bring you to not only get their books
| for free but _you_ had to go get them for _them_
| asdff wrote:
| He is far from the only case of the rich getting
| differential treatment under the law. These stories are
| really a dime a dozen. How about this case of a rich boy
| from the affluent suburbs of LA (palos verdes estates,
| where Trump's golf course is), decides its cool to become a
| gang banger, gets involved with a murder, and is acquitted.
|
| https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/07/23/cameron-
| terrell-a...
| vmception wrote:
| > Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
|
| (By recall election right?)
| cratermoon wrote:
| Yes, he was recalled. It's unlikely that if he'd been an
| appointed-for-life judge that the legislature would have
| removed him.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
|
| Just as a matter of terminology, I think one doesn't
| usually speak of judges being fired. He lost his seat in a
| recall election.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Persky#Repercussions_to
| _...
| geebee wrote:
| My understanding is that he also had a history of giving
| light sentences, not just to upper middle class
| defendants, and that his banishment has gone well beyond
| losing his job.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/recalled
| -ju...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The existence of a remedy isn't a good excuse for avoidable
| injuries. The resolutions you allude to in that case took
| place _after_ the public became incensed at the delicate
| treatment handed out to a guy who was _literally_ caught in
| the act of humping a passed out woman behind a dumpster.
| fhars wrote:
| But it is illegal for the rich and the poor alike to sleep
| under bridges and to beg in the streets.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The law, in its infinite wisdom, decrees it so.
| huijzer wrote:
| I can only guess why, but I do know that it's not new. For
| example, around 1920, journalists were praising Hershey town as
| a town without crime even though the town had many incidents
| (Michael D'Antonio).
| bdowling wrote:
| For some journalists, idealism trumps integrity.
| mandmandam wrote:
| In short, I'd guess that's because the companies reporting on
| them are owned by billionaires, and shareholders with bags of
| fossil fuel, war, banking, etc, stocks.
|
| For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by
| Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?
|
| Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all
| objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport.
| They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of
| our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Yeah, better to listen to someone with unknown credentials on
| Substack, or whatever I dig up on Facebook. That will put the
| MSM in their place.
|
| By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine _does_ cure
| COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM)
| doesn 't want you to know.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Let's not overestimate the critical thinking skill
| advantage separating journalists from other people. I can
| check the citations as well as any editor, sometimes better
| because I know some things about math and have no reason to
| be biased.
|
| When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is
| getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to
| add. Spending years pouring over account records?
| Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a
| hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets
| to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are
| things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I
| could.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard
| set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any
| advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.
| sophacles wrote:
| Well here's one thing: they tend to cite sources. Do you
| have any actual data on your assertion? What you "fail to
| see" is merely a statement of your observation skills. I
| would like to compare that with other sources that aren't
| so clearly biased.
| bvhg3 wrote:
| Primary source: "persons familiar with the matter".
| sophacles wrote:
| Ahh, well I don't know or care who would be familiar with
| your observation skills. Im asking for data, do you have
| that or not?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yeah, I've got it. Citing the source is kind of basic.
| But, by itself, alone, it doesn't amount to much, if they
| can't even keep fidelity to the original source, if they
| can't even begin to understand the content they are
| citing. And this thing happens all the time.
| sophacles wrote:
| Can you provide data about this? Can you provide data
| over time - like is this a new thing?
|
| Until then you are just doing the same thing as the
| parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on
| what can only be labeled as "your own bias".
|
| I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act
| differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the
| media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to
| actually back up your claims with any real data. If it
| wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Is that based on empirical analysis of the data?
|
| I'm thinking not.
|
| Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a
| lot of journalists in the world churning out content
| every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't
| see any evidence that the failures represent even a
| majority of the content.
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's kind of the problem: the "legacy" media are
| unreliable, but people seem to take that as license to
| transfer total trust to some completely random media
| organisation that has god-knows-what agenda. Because it's
| very difficult to operate in an environment of total
| paranoia about every statement.
| Karunamon wrote:
| "Total paranoia" might be overselling it a bit. "Total
| skepticism", that is, "presumed bullshit until otherwise
| substantiated" is much more reasonable, and it can be
| applied to all media sources, legacy and otherwise.
| bvhg3 wrote:
| Unfortunately it seems like skepticism is increasingly
| being branded as lunacy.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| WSJ is respected because of its reporting track record,
| compared to other sources.
|
| That's really all you can go on.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| You can't just say "cut them out" without some replacement
| way of disseminating similar knowledge around. The media has
| plenty of issues, but as a whole, they are still the best way
| we have of doing that. At least with media we have a good
| sense of where their bias is from outfit to outfit and can
| take in additional information or get it from multiple
| sources to combat those biases.
|
| So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And
| one answer I won't accept is individuals without any
| oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs,
| video, social media, etc.).
| [deleted]
| linuxftw wrote:
| Clearly we need to setup the Social Media Agency and regulate
| them. We'll staff the agency with high level political
| appointments comprised entirely of Twitter and Facebook
| executives.
|
| Works for the FDA, anyway.
| edoceo wrote:
| We can call the the Ministry of Truth.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It was inconceivable before 9/11 that we would ever have
| something called "Department of Homeland Security" or be
| "asked for our papers". Yet, right afterwards, we were
| given the "Department of Homeland Security" and the
| "Patriot Act", which has been extended every single time,
| despite how it has been regularly abused. My children have
| grown up into adults not knowing anything else. Just wait a
| short while. If you don't do something, you will live under
| the "Ministry of Truth".
| smsm42 wrote:
| The scary thing is now this is one step from the government
| policy. And in some countries, it's already becoming the
| government policy.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Every FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and
| it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to
| "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians
| are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not
| only do _they_ likely profit off the success of Facebook, there
| are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On
| top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it 's wrapped up
| with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.
| sdrawkcabmai wrote:
| Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google,
| Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large
| but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a
| reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on
| purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more
| attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| In this particular case, it's only Facebook and Twitter that
| are significant social networks and they are responsible for
| the biggest spread of misinformation. Google is a close
| third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search
| results (and not the websites they link to which their
| algorithm considers most important).
|
| I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that
| thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of
| them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will
| leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets -
| like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of
| favorites - will be surprising.
|
| Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people
| would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of
| high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the
| ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a
| big chunk of their annual revenue.
|
| Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling
| financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm
| sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then,
| Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators
| have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a
| very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens
| of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on
| things.
|
| TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make
| them the most money.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible
| for its own search results (and not the websites they link
| to which their algorithm considers most important).
|
| If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they
| pull even with Facebook and Twitter.
|
| They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep
| eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads),
| and nothing else.
|
| >in Google's effort to keep people on its video platform as
| long as possible, "its algorithm seems to have concluded
| that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than
| what they started with--or to incendiary content in
| general," and adds, "It is also possible that YouTube's
| recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory
| content."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtub
| e...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Facebook and Twitter [are] responsible for the biggest
| spread of misinformation
|
| I really wish it was that simple. if it was, we could just
| ban it all and have done with it. For the US this is a
| symptom of the splitting of a country into multiple warring
| parts. Partly whipped up by news networks, print journalism
| and all by the constant war for your attention.
|
| TV news picks up some stupid tweet, offers it as an morsel
| for 5 minutes of hate. This pissed people off, they got
| online and berate the original tweet, the "other side"
| counter attacks, rinse, repeat. (see critical race theory)
|
| The general public are being played, so that a number of
| large corporations can get attention enough to sell
| advertising space.
|
| > Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible
| for its own search results
|
| why wouldn't you? I mean they are well known for allowing
| advertisers to manipulate results. They track your
| location, what your reading, who your talking to, and sell
| the products to third parties. If we should be keeping an
| eye on anyone, it should be google. The level of
| questioning that FB gets _must_ be applied to any of the
| internet giants.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because
| FB is different in some way?
|
| Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of
| these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference
| between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is
| that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward
| in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes
| about him being a robot or alien.
|
| Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless
| or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the
| same level of creepy even though they also want to own your
| data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much
| as Facebook.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Microsoft was a serial liar for decades over its efforts to
| quash competition for DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and
| its "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Amazon's
| statements about working conditions in its warehouses and its
| treatment of workers trying to unionize directly contradict
| documented actions. Twitter says one thing regarding abusive
| and hateful users but does another. Google finessed its theft
| of Java.
|
| Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as
| profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity
| and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are
| _required_ and _acceptable_
| castis wrote:
| I dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them
| would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be
| honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.
| [deleted]
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I recall Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to have lied a
| ton.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I put all of the companies you name in pretty much the same
| basket, and avoid them as much as I can. I don't shop on
| Amazon, I don't use Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter. I
| don't use Apple products. I do use Android and Google
| Docs/Drive/Mail but my next phone will probably be an open
| one and I could drop the GSuite stuff without too much pain,
| mostly laziness that I haven't already.
| davidkellis wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Trying my best to de-FAANG my life.
| Self hosting as much as possible, with as little management
| overhead as possible, but I'm still stuck on Android and I
| don't know how to break free.
| armagon wrote:
| Which self-hosting software do you recommend?
| davidkellis wrote:
| I'm self hosting Ghost for blogging, Home Assistant for
| smart home controller, and in the middle of setting up
| Vaultwarden for passwords. I also run a lot of stuff off
| my Synology - Synology Drive instead of Dropbox or Google
| Drive, Synology Photos instead of Google Photos. I don't
| have a great solution for email or phone - emails is paid
| hosting through Zoho and use Android for phone. I'd like
| to get off those. It's all a long drawn out process.
| schiem wrote:
| It's not quite ready for the prime time, but there are
| some open source phones in the works. The two most
| notable are the Librem 5
| (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/) and the
| Pinephone (https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/).
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| De-Googled android distros are definitely out there, but
| I also think flip phone plus small portable laptop is a
| very powerful combo.
| retro64 wrote:
| Flip phone. People laugh at mine, whatever. Honestly
| though I use a flip because it does what I need and it's
| tough as nails.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| In a few years this will be considered the only sane
| approach to digital life. There is still some road to
| travel though in terms of making it easy for the majority
| of people.
|
| In retrospect the "big tech" era will be such a sad, dark,
| insidiously toxic period. So much hypocrisy, so much in-
| your face failure to honor basic social contracts, so much
| misallocated talent...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Do we have that collective fiction? I don't personally know
| anyone who thought that Facebook applied its rules to all
| equally, and certainly nobody here in the HN comments seems to
| be surprised.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate
| messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy?
| Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking
| time?
|
| Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies
| WriterGuy2021 wrote:
| That's not the only collective fiction that's problematic. At
| this point, the lies are the only thing keeping everything
| going.
| dboreham wrote:
| Whenever I see such a corporate communication, my mental
| process is to immediately imagine the meeting that led to its
| creation, having attended many such meetings.
|
| Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my
| kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their
| lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would
| have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put
| out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."
| seph-reed wrote:
| My personal pet theory is that -- whether we admit it or not --
| most people are somewhat... spiritual? Humans tend to see and
| believe in meaning where none exists.
|
| Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us,
| because it's a constant reminder that either:
|
| 1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or
|
| 2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.
|
| Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just
| subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling
| oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this
| happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest
| they admit to #1 or #2 above.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Today I asked the public transportation company here to either
| enforce their mask mandate, or to let it completely be so
| people who actually care can decide for themselves how big of a
| risk they are willing to take. By having a mask mandate which
| is not being enforced many customers might get a false feel of
| security.
|
| Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being
| fact checked and false information content is being taken down
| after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down
| must be true.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apple says privacy is a human right, too. Companies failing to
| put their money where their mouth is has become par for the
| course.
| aquir wrote:
| Facebook should be banned on DNS level...
| [deleted]
| mox1 wrote:
| Is it really that bad that they apply slightly different sets of
| rules to accounts with more notoriety?
|
| For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created
| accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account
| with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million
| followers?
|
| Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll
| account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here
| might, but I don't).
|
| I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you
| should be given * _some*_ flexibility under the rules. Imagine a
| points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points,
| and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you
| are banned, suspended, etc.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of
| aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and
| fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case
| basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was
| granted with little record of who had granted it and why,
| according to the 2019 audit.".
|
| It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook,
| and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible
| ofcourse.
|
| The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are
| given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because
| of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China
| which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing
| more or less the same happen in the west about our own
| controversial issues.
|
| [sarcasm not directed at you] But it's ok. In the west
| companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do
| business with whoever they want. It is not censorship
| therefore. [/sarcasm not directed at you]
| bmhin wrote:
| > The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind
| of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane
| and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by
| case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status
| was granted with little record of who had granted it and why,
| according to the 2019 audit.".
|
| This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be
| applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with
| their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their
| millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely
| different experiences. The regular person might expect none
| of their comments to ever get reported and any report could
| be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on
| the other hand might see every single thing they post
| reported a ton every single time.
|
| And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which
| Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just
| chucked people into the special people list and that's that.
| The article stated there are _millions_ on that list. A catch
| all for all the people who are having the greatest impact
| seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for
| potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in
| percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person
| list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group
| is also wildly influential and thus shouldn 't be in the "too
| weird" category.
|
| I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people
| (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird
| to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch
| all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should
| be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The
| article made it seem like the policy for this particular
| remedy was non-existent.
|
| Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the
| central conceit is "connecting people" then no person
| realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't
| need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd
| never happen, but it seems like a root answer.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| So the more followers someone has, the _less_ scrunity of their
| content to make sure it follows Facebook 's guidelines they
| get... this seems backwards.
| narrator wrote:
| I have been better trying to understand how the world will change
| under China's hegemony. To that end, I have been studying Neo-
| Confucianism. That being adaptations of Confucianism, the ancient
| Chinese philosophy of governance, to the 21st century. Facebook's
| policy seems very neo-Confucian.
|
| "Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an
| idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point
| of view, people are unequal--as they differ in virtue,
| intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible
| to give everyone equal rights without considering their
| standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the
| law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal
| rights or obligations."[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing_(Confucian)
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I will jump on this bandwagon and say color me not surprised.
|
| The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust
| in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors
| normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but
| moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a
| point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is
| military.
|
| That is not a good state of affairs.
| jackfoxy wrote:
| And the military is the pawn of a corrupt State Department,
| national security elite, and military industrial complex, which
| renders moot the mostly honorable conduct of people in the
| military.
| notacoward wrote:
| > the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military
|
| Only in certain quarters. The US military has been subject to
| deliberate infiltration by both evangelicals (especially Air
| Force), white supremacists, and proto-insurrectionists for
| decades. More recently, there has been a seemingly endless
| parade of officers committing public acts of insubordination,
| or even incitement to mutiny/sedition. At this point, trust in
| the military is mostly limited to people who share those
| agendas.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That is quite the claim, do you have proof?
| ep103 wrote:
| Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address
| issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that
| the general populace genuinely understands them. From neonics
| and bees to misinformation and facebook. But our political
| class has adopted a policy that demands no action be taken, as
| that is the official policy position on all free-market related
| issues for one of the two major political parties.
|
| So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is
| presented with drops.
|
| Which means societal trust drops.
|
| And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
| rajin444 wrote:
| Giving more power to those abusing it is not going to create
| trust.
|
| Trust has been broken for all of human history. It's just
| much easier for us to notice it now. I don't know the
| solution, but more of what we've been doing isn't it.
| rektide wrote:
| > _Because we need regulation of new technologies and to
| address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing
| enough that the general populace genuinely understands them._
|
| in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened,
| from my perspective, is that only a small handful of
| platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all
| of our social media world. this is largely via a system of
| rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously
| high switching costs of leaving any given network.
|
| we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need
| more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of
| moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well
| over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to
| regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a
| better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull
| places, via innovation & competition.
|
| personally i feel like social networks are elemental to
| freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today.
| if we as a public value speech, believe it important for
| public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund
| development & running of public good works. we should fund
| the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful
| moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that
| are important to us.
| maccolgan wrote:
| >policy that demands no action be taken
|
| If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The
| government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's
| not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.
|
| Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has
| always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone,
| pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.
| btbuildem wrote:
| How naive do you have to be to believe them at face value? Of
| course they're opportunistic liars.
|
| The best thing to do with Facebook is to nuke their data centres
| and incarcerate the execs and board members.
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| Take it easy...
| jmwilson wrote:
| Strong opsec that the supporting documents are actual photos of a
| computer screen from the visible moire (or somehow altered to
| look that way).
|
| After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became
| very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this
| 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next
| day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-
| zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends
| liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).
|
| Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring
| everything down to the system call level, and practically every
| access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only
| way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to
| photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact
| that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are
| nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a
| screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file
| ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ...
| congratulations, you're caught.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends
| liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).
|
| Well that, and the fact that his face was immediately to the
| left of his name.
| nindalf wrote:
| Huh, never thought I'd see XCheck in a news article. I used to
| work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors
| and partly fixed it. It's still not perfect but it's better than
| it used to be.
|
| I think I might have agreed with the author of this article
| before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I
| learned that any system that's meant to work for millions of
| users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over.
| Especially when it's not a system owned and operated by a handful
| of people. Here's an example - as far as I know it's not possible
| for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The
| system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many
| attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now.
| There's no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works
| reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose
| accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His
| inconvenience is an edge case.
|
| With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team
| working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a
| sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built
| by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck
| as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the
| other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there's always room
| for improvement.
|
| I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process
| for adding shields wasn't policed internally very well in the
| past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive
| accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would
| get a "Shielded-ID-Verified" tag applied to it. ID verification
| was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams
| that weren't related to applying the tag would see the tag and
| assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more
| I realised no one really "owned" the tag or policed who could
| apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular
| loop hole.
|
| In later years the XCheck system started being actively
| maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into
| problems like these and made it better.
| smsm42 wrote:
| I think people that work on this feature mean well - or at
| least they think that they mean well. But as a result, we have
| a two-tier system where the peasants have one set of rules and
| the nobility has an entirely different one. It may have started
| as a hack to correct the obvious inadequacies of the moderation
| system, but it grew into something much more sinister and alien
| to the spirit of free speech, and is ripe for capture by
| ideologically driven partisans (which, in my opinion, has
| already happened). And once it did, the care that people
| implementing and maintaining the unjust system have for it
| isn't exactly a consolation for anybody who encounters it.
| nindalf wrote:
| Let me try to explain it again. Suppose an integrity system
| has a true positive rate of 99.99%. That would be good enough
| to deploy right? Except that when applied to millions of
| accounts, 0.01% is still a massive number of people. This is
| even worse when those people are unusual in some way. For
| example they might open conversations with hundreds of
| strangers a day for good reasons. But their behaviour is so
| similar to those of abusive accounts that they get penalised.
|
| You might say that maybe 99.99% isn't good enough and the
| engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it's possible but I
| don't know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.
|
| Your concerns about different treatment for some people is
| valid. But again, their experience is different. For example,
| if an account or content is reported by hundreds of people
| it'll be taken down. After all, there's no reason for
| accounts in good standing to lie right? Except celebrities
| often are at the receiving end of such campaigns. There needs
| to be exceptions so such rules aren't exploited in such a
| manner.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| >"After all, there's no reason for accounts in good
| standing to lie, right?" No reason is different from no
| good reason.
|
| Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think
| anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's
| scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because
| .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day
| gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida
| (~300,000 people).
|
| Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no
| problem to increase the size of the team working on the
| tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be
| broken down into smaller parts, the edge cases can be
| caught and/or anticipated, creative solutions can be
| applied, etc.
|
| If history teaches us anything, it's that all public facing
| systems will be exploited. Those who design them should
| anticipate this.
|
| (Thanks, by the way, for posting about your perspective. It
| looks very different to those of us on the outside.)
| nindalf wrote:
| > Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no
| problem to increase the size of the team working on the
| tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be
| broken down into smaller parts
|
| And I worked for 4 years on one such small part
| (internally called UFAC), trying to help potential false
| positives of such a system.
|
| As for classifier with a true positive rate of 99.99999%,
| I don't know much but I don't think it's possible. But if
| there's someone out there who might know, then they
| should say so.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > You might say that maybe 99.99% isn't good enough and the
| engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it's possible but I
| don't know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.
|
| Hire a large human moderation team. Facebook can afford to.
| They choose not to.
| nindalf wrote:
| > a large human moderation team
|
| You're not the only person who has suggested this. Let's
| think about that for a second. Let's say it takes 6
| minutes for a moderation team to review an older account.
| There's 2 billion accounts, so it'd be good to review all
| of those. It would take about 200 million hours.
| Presumably you'd want to re-review positive cases so no
| moderator has too much power. Additional time. Even if
| Facebook literally doubled the number of employees, and
| hired 50000 people overnight, they would still take 2
| years to complete the review. But in that time it's
| possible that previously benign accounts turn abusive.
|
| And then think about the 20 million odd new accounts that
| are created every day. How long before each of those are
| reviewed? And what signals will you use to review them?
| These are mostly empty accounts, so there's not much to
| go on.
|
| And that's just the problem of aged fake accounts. How
| about bullying, harassment, nudity, terrorism, CEI and
| all the other problems?
|
| It's interesting talking to people who say "oh that
| problem is easy to solve, just do X" without realising
| that the problem is more complicated than it looks.
| specialist wrote:
| Facebook shouldn't be expected to clean up the messes
| they create because it's hard?
| robocat wrote:
| They didn't say that: none of their comments seem to be
| defending Facebook. They are giving their opinion that
| human moderation is not a simple solution. I super
| appreciate nindalf's comments here. It is a shame that an
| _ex_ -developer who knows the problem space and is
| clearly explaining some if the issues is getting flamed
| by association.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > It's interesting talking to people who say "oh that
| problem is easy to solve, just do X" without realising
| that the problem is more complicated than it looks.
|
| At no point did I state that the solution was easy. My
| response was to your claim that you do not know of any
| _possible_ solution, not an _easy_ solution; to wit, you
| invited input:
|
| > Maybe it's possible but I don't know how. If you have
| ideas on this, please share.
|
| I also don't follow your examples. Why are you tasking
| this hypothetical team to review all two billion
| accounts? The main issue at hand seems to be lack of
| sufficient staffing to review reported accounts. Why not
| start there?
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Meh, we already live in a world with one set of rules for the
| peasants and another for the nobility. Seems like just
| another area where Facebook reflects the real world.
| q1w2 wrote:
| You have to remember that high profile accounts get 10000x
| the number of abuse-reports than a normal account - nearly
| all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions simply
| do not work.
|
| Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they
| see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an
| opposing team.
|
| If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high
| profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.
|
| Maybe a better system would penalize _reporters_ that are
| found to have reported content that do NOT violent content
| policies?
| danudey wrote:
| This is exactly the solution. IF tons of people are
| reporting Steve Newscaster because he posted a status about
| how his team won, then he shouldn't become immune to
| criticism, those people should lose the privilege of having
| their voice heard.
|
| Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely
| reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're
| restricting your ability to report content for 30 days."
| and if they keep doing it, make it permanent.
| stickfigure wrote:
| That might not work. In the eternal September of Facebook
| there may always be enough new accounts to continuously
| file false reports against high profile accounts.
| greenyoda wrote:
| HN has addressed this problem by not granting new users
| flagging privileges - you need a certain karma threshold
| to flag an article or comment.
|
| And flagging/vouching privileges can be removed for HN
| users who abuse them.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah but you can just buy warmed-up verified accounts on
| SEO marketplaces, often several years old and patiently
| curated to be blandly inoffensive and ready to be turned
| into whatever you need.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Still, having to do that greatly reduces the problem. The
| average person who wants to censor a politician they hate
| isn't going to spend money to buy an account.
|
| Another potential mitigation might be to put a limit on
| the number of posts that a single user can flag in a day.
| At some point, the cost of large-scale content
| manipulation could be made to exceed the expected gains.
|
| It may even be profitable for Facebook to crack down on
| this. Every celebrity post that gets illegitimately taken
| down has potential for showing ads to millions of people.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > high profile accounts get 10000x the number of abuse-
| reports
|
| Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal
| from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring
| this "mass downvote" is the _essence_ of the structural
| elitism?
| vasco wrote:
| Popular users get lots of eyeballs on their content. If
| an average post will get 1 report per 10k views, a
| popular post with 10m views will get 1000 reports. It
| doesn't have to have a deeper meaning.
| paulmd wrote:
| well, in that case, why not make the metric reports-per-
| view? if you make the metric a rate then it doesn't
| matter whether it gets 10k views or 10m views, the
| question becomes "what % of viewers thought this was
| worth a report".
|
| The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-
| visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave
| the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using
| a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Even if it was, it's really not Facebooks job to rework
| the social structure.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Facebook is already doing that. It just happens to be
| making choices about how to do it that maximize its
| profits while ignoring the voices of most of its users.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| I would rather them maximize profits rather than decide
| to actually take a stance in manipulating society. At
| least I know where I stand with a greedy corporation.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The tail end of more than a billion users is very long.
|
| I wouldn't be surprise if a million users understood
| "report" as a downvote for a post they don't like.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > You have to remember that high profile accounts get
| 10000x the number of abuse-reports than a normal account -
| nearly all bogus. The normal automated moderation functions
| simply do not work.
|
| You would think with the _literal legion of geniuses_
| Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling
| reports than simply counting them and taking down content
| that receives over X reports.
| Talanes wrote:
| >Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are
| found to have reported content that do NOT violent content
| policies?
|
| This might work if the response to a report wasn't so
| arbitrary. I've been given bans for using heated language,
| yet had comments that were just as heated AND making direct
| threats at people marked as not violating any rules when I
| made the report.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| In addition, maybe a better system would also increase the
| effort needed to file a report. Calling in and leaving a
| voicemail message in response to specific questions, for
| example.
| otterley wrote:
| Nobody is complaining that Facebook has exceptions for
| automatically suspending accounts just because people are
| misreporting them as abusive. The issue is, and has always
| been, exceptions to the content-based rules which are
| supposed to apply equally to everyone.
| nindalf wrote:
| So if hundreds of people reported the content posted by a
| celebrity, or if a classifier misfired on the content
| posted by a celebrity, there shouldn't be any protection
| for the content?
| otterley wrote:
| The content should be evaluated according to the same set
| of the rules that apply to everyone else. If the content
| classification rules are properly implemented, no amount
| of button-smashing should result in a different outcome.
| frumper wrote:
| A person spending a minute looking at something that has
| garnered a high number of reports is reasonable instead
| of just ignoring reports because it's a celebrity. It
| doesn't have to be automated. Edge cases can be expensive
| lmilcin wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Let's take your example of Mark Z.
|
| What makes you think that this is unique case? What about
| people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects?
|
| A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices
| and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered,
| unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete
| the procedure on the new device.
|
| I could think of a lot of people that would find it useful.
|
| Or allow setting up 2FA token (other than mobile) correctly.
|
| Instead what FB does is make it impossible to secure your
| account because they insist whatever you want you should always
| be able to recover your password with your phone number.
|
| Years ago when I was still using it (I had reason) I tried to
| secure it with my Yubico. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to
| configure FB to not allow you to log in on a new device without
| the key.
|
| I understand how the discussion probably went: "Let's make it
| so that we can score some marketing points but let's not really
| make it requirement because we will be flooded with requests
| from people who do not understand they will never be able to
| log in if they loose the token."
|
| But that's exactly what _I_ want. I have a small fleet of these
| so it is not possible for me to loose them all but
| unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can 't do
| it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple
| tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account
| so it is not possible to log in the next time without the
| token.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't
| do it well because they either don't allow configuring
| multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock
| your account so it is not possible to log in the next time
| without the token.
|
| This is a great point. AFAIK, Google is the only service
| which allows you to set mandatory U2F login requirements.
| Does any other service offer this functionality?
| manquer wrote:
| Many enterprise apps you can force it or depend on
| authentication from Google or Azure kind of SSO providers,
| who have this feature.
|
| Consumer apps try hard not to do hard security unless they
| are forced to, usually for cost reasons.
|
| Security measures like these create a ton of administrative
| tickets - check any sysad ticket queue a good chunk is
| password reset/recovery, in enterprise apps the org sysads
| are paid to handle this.
|
| In consumer apps, the app company has to manage it, also it
| lot harder to verify identity of a random user than company
| employees making it harder to do this kind of support.
|
| A good jarring example is AWS, the amazon.com and AWS did
| (does?) share authentication stack so some basic 2FA
| functionality like backup codes is not there for AWS .
|
| Google is better at this because they have for long time
| also focused on SSO service as a product.
|
| Many companies use Google AD /SSO workspace/suite because
| third party apps support google login out-of the box
| free[1], maybe charge for AzureAD/SAML2 and likely not
| support others at all without customization costs.
|
| [1]It is standard because SMB/mid market companies are more
| likely to use Google for productivity than Azure/o365 as it
| is easier to manage albeit with lesser features. Third
| party apps don't want to expend support time on smaller
| customers if they can avoid it
| cbsmith wrote:
| The never allowing multiple tokens things drives me nuts.
| tialaramex wrote:
| People do bring this up on HN a lot. For WebAuthn / U2F the
| only actual example anybody has is AWS. So that's not an
| industry problem that's specifically an AWS problem. Unless
| you have an _actual_ example which isn 't AWS?
|
| As to TOTP it's a shared secret, so just clone it. If they
| allow you to set multiple secrets it would just reduce your
| overall security because more random guesses work. Also,
| get WebAuthn instead.
| gkop wrote:
| Your analogy relating to Zuckerberg is absurdly tone deaf.
| q1w2 wrote:
| The accusation of being "tone deaf" is one of those "it
| doesn't matter if you're technically right - you're arguing
| for the wrong team" comments.
|
| If you have a substantive criticism to make, you should
| articulate it.
| gkop wrote:
| _absurdly_ tone deaf, as in, does not warrant good faith
| engagement, "don't feed the trolls".
| mdoms wrote:
| If you're not interested in good faith engagement then
| I'd suggest not posting in the comments section. It's
| what we're here for.
| gkop wrote:
| Please consider the power dynamics here. The HN community
| owes no favors to FB or FB former staff. When a former FB
| staff member logs on to post the kind of response they
| posted, community members may stand up and call them out
| on their trolling. I accept the consequences of my
| behavior (as my comments arguably violate HN guidelines),
| and am open to learning more about the FB's behavior,
| from _good faith_ commenters on both sides.
| nindalf wrote:
| I think it's valid because it's an example of a system not
| working for a small minority while still working well for
| others. And more pertinently, there's no plans to fix it for
| him specifically just because he's the CEO. It's better to
| spend time making the account compromise system better for
| the vast majority of users instead.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > I think it's valid because it's an example of a system
| not working for a small minority while still working well
| for others.
|
| That's not what the article mentioned, which is why people
| are saying you don't seem to understand. The article
| mentioned there is a system, which _does work_ for a small
| minority of people, not that it doesn 't work for them.
| It's as if you unintentionally have blinders on and can't
| see the issue.
| SamBam wrote:
| It is tone-deaf. You seem to be regaling it as an
| inconvenience or problem that Zuckerburg has. It's not an
| inconvenience, it's a personal bodyguard that he alone has.
| If he changes devices, he has a team to allow him to log
| into it. How is that relevant?
|
| The rest of us don't get that. If someone hacks our account
| and changes our password, the majority of us have little
| hope of really getting FB's attention to help us fix it.
|
| The point about popular accounts getting 10000x the number
| of abuse reports is much more relevant.
| Closi wrote:
| It's relevant because it's an example of where an account
| needs special rules/treatment because of the status.
|
| It's saying "Do we all agree that some accounts, such as
| Zuck's, might need different treatment?"
|
| Because once you have established that, it's clear why
| some other accounts might need different/special
| treatment compared to the typical user.
| dado3212 wrote:
| The point isn't that he gets special protection for
| logging on on new devices, it's that he receives
| thousands of fake login attempts a day. It's basically
| the same point: 10000x the number of abuse reports be
| 10000x the number of login attempts.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The problem is not account compromise. Nobody is
| complaining about inability to compromise Zuckerberg's
| account or it being to hard to register a new device or
| anything like that. The issue is question is the two-tier
| (or maybe multiple-tier) system of rules that secretly
| exists inside Facebook while the public materials falsely
| claim all users are guided by the same rules.
| elmomle wrote:
| Or perhaps the underlying business/product model is
| inherently flawed in a way that's bad for society, all
| patches have proven woefully insufficient in mitigating
| that, and Facebook have been intentionally concealing this.
| lakis wrote:
| No it is not. What if Trump or Biden could not login to
| Facebook due to too many failed attempts ? Would they scream
| that Facebook is blocking them and FB MUST unblock them.
| Should FB just tell them, "Tough, you can't use Facebook,
| deal with it?" What if it was Ronaldo or Brad Pitt.
|
| A company will make exemptions for very famous people. In
| every case, when something grows too big, you will find that
| are special cases that must be exempt from the general rules.
| There are very few exemption to this. Usually rule of law.
| Almost anything else has exemption.
|
| Disclaimer. I don't and never worked in Facebook. And I
| barely use Facebook. BUT I've build big systems that deal
| with the web and the real world.
| lanstin wrote:
| There was special code in AOL's mail system to keep Steve
| Case's mail box index in memory all the time.
| josefresco wrote:
| > Huh, never thought I'd see XCheck in a news article.
|
| Is everyone at Facebook this naive? You didn't think a system
| that creates a secret tier of VIP accounts where the rules (and
| laws) don't apply while publicly claiming the opposite would
| end up ... in the news?!?!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| One of the nice things about transparency is not having to
| engage in performative theatrics at a later date.
| cheath wrote:
| One of my favorite things about HN is seeing people come out of
| the woodwork to raise their hand and say that they worked on a
| system and give their insight. Thanks for sharing this
| perspective.
| rwmj wrote:
| So when Mark Zuckerberg buys a new phone or whatever, what
| happens?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| My bet is he emails the auth team and gives as much info as
| he can about the device. Then they create auth rules as if a
| regular login had happened.
|
| I also assume if he's on the internal network it might be
| easier to just manually allow auth attemps from a few
| internal IPs for a few seconds.
| schwank wrote:
| This system also made it impossible for me to ever log in
| again. It had been a few years since I used FB but some friends
| tagged me at an event, so I figured what the heck.
|
| I was presented with a system I had never configured, which
| asked me to contact people I don't know to get them to vouch
| for me. At the same time my FB profile was blackholed, and my
| wife and long time actual friends can't even see that I exist
| anymore. Just some person that astroturfed my name with no
| content (I have a globally unique name).
|
| So I no longer exist from FB perspective, which made both my
| decision to not use FB as well as never use any FB products
| like Occulus much easier.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the
| critical replies.
|
| I think that with your background and investment in improving
| these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the
| perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally
| rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core
| business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and
| misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily
| moderate with the left.
|
| You can hire whole teams to prevent singed fingers or protect
| certain possessions, but the point of a fire is to burn. If
| there are no good solutions while maintaining FB's core
| approach and business model, then it would be better for the
| world if it were extinguished.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Note that moderation is not part of the business plan. FB was
| pretty much dragged kicking and screaming into that function.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation
| with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with
| the left.
|
| Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but
| I'm curious if you consider this an issue of _Facebook_ or of
| social media in general.
|
| Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you
| generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech
| and misinformation" on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube even
| (personal experience: I have a family member that was
| radicalized by misinformation on the internet. It was all on
| Youtube, she had never even used Facebook).
|
| I've noticed that people go a lot harder on Facebook than on
| other tech companies. I think Facebook's reputation is well
| deserved, but I do think that reputation should be shared
| with really all social media in general.
| efleurine wrote:
| You are totally right. I have seen some posts on some
| networks that brand themselves as the guardian of free
| speech. Well if we took them to a Facebook Twitter
| proportion the same problems will arise very soon. So just
| may be the problem is with the people too.
|
| If those current big techs were to disappear, would people
| stop their nonsense and sometimes hated behavior?
|
| I am starting to believe that is not just bad company
| management or moderation, we definitely have bad actors on
| those networks too.
|
| The problem is complex
| annadane wrote:
| The problem seems to be though, that while the company may have
| tools to detect abuse, if they're choosing selectively when to
| enforce things it defeats the entire point
|
| Edit: downvotes from shills
| nindalf wrote:
| That wasn't my experience over several years. Whenever we
| found a new vector of abuse or detected systems misfiring we
| would take it seriously.
| some_hacker33 wrote:
| are you from the UK or india?
| dundermuffl1n wrote:
| Most of your response treats the service and its flaws as an
| engineering problem, whereas the ramifications in the real
| world aren't something Facebook gets to absolve itself from.
| They need to own the problem completely. If they can't solve
| the issue through engineering, it is their responsibility to
| hire hundreds of thousands of moderators.
| otterley wrote:
| You haven't really touched on the main problem discussed in the
| article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users -
| mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by
| different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed
| to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its
| inequalities.
| q1w2 wrote:
| The real underlying issue is that high profile accounts are
| targeted by groups of users who "report abuse" simply because
| they don't like that sports team/politician/etc...
|
| High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or
| they'd simply all be suspended all the time.
| acoil wrote:
| Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people-
| its in the _name_. Who 's face is prettier?
| otterley wrote:
| You're thinking of HotOrNot. A "face book" has been a
| staple of US universities for decades to help new students
| identify each other. They were literally printed booklets
| with people's faces in it.
| munk-a wrote:
| I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been
| about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the
| middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But
| it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit
| into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook
| was essentially little more than HotOrNot.
| otterley wrote:
| I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was
| only open to college students (and the domain name was
| thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe.
| There was no ranking of faces.
|
| You can see for yourself by searching for "2005 Facebook
| screenshots".
| [deleted]
| zepto wrote:
| > Social media was supposed to help level the playing field
| of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.
|
| Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at
| Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any
| playing field.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| This was a common belief in the early history of blogging.
| Facebook was a later manifestation of social media.
| zepto wrote:
| Why did people believe that?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th
| century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV
| network, about the only way you could let the world know
| your views was to write a letter to the editor of your
| local paper. And even if you could somehow make a friend
| in a far-away land, phone calls and postal mail were
| expensive. (I'm still sad I lost touch with students I
| met in Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia in the 80's)
|
| The internet, and social media in particular, changed all
| that. First only nerds could make a web pages. Some, like
| me, published our thoughts there using raw HTML. Then
| Moveable Type allowed anyone with an FTP site to publish.
| Then Blogger allowed anyone with a browser to publish.
| Then Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. It
| was an exciting time.
|
| I hope this help explains why we thought this would
| "level the playing field." What we read and what we
| watched was no longer dictated by TV Network bosses or
| editorial boards. Governments could no longer demonize
| people in other lands, because we were all free to (for
| example) be Facebook friends with those people. At least
| that was the theory. As I mentioned in another comment,
| it sure hasn't worked out that way.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Social media was supposed to help level the playing field
| of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.
|
| This is literally the first time I've heard anyone voice this
| expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at
| any point in time.
| otterley wrote:
| Facebook's own mission statement is "to give _people_ the
| power to share and to make the world more connected"
| (emphasis mine). And if you were there when Facebook was
| founded, as I was, before celebrities and politicians were
| accommodated by them, you would have felt very empowered
| indeed.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the
| 00's "web 2.0" days, and it didn't seem ludicrous. Removing
| government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and
| TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could
| finally be heard --anyone could have a blog or whatever and
| be heard. It wasn't crazy to think that if only everyone in
| the world could finally talk to each other that we could
| work out differences and make friendships across political
| and geographical boundaries.
|
| That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is
| still running seems to have falsified it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in
| the 00's "web 2.0" days, and it didn't seem ludicrous.
|
| I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly
| equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but
| never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous
| for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply
| equally to social media:
|
| (1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and
| any benefits they brought would naturally increase
| inequality across that divide.
|
| (2) In the longer term, where one might presume the
| digital divide would erode, they overlooked that while
| the services involved were generally still in the
| venture-subsidized artificially
| underpriced/undermonetized phase, any plausible business
| model would either promote inequality by narrowing reach
| to an elite or promote inequality by creating sharply
| tiered service or (most commonly) a sharp division
| between a broad class of users being engaged to be
| marketed to moneyed interests and the moneyed interests
| buying their eyeballs. Any prediction of resolving
| inequality was based on venture subsidies and monopoly
| building dumping being converted into a permanent state
| out of charity.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| We may then just have different scopes for what counts as
| "Social Media" and what are other "categories of online
| services". The wikipedia definition seems good:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
|
| > Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were
| obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:
|
| It seems post facto to conclude that they were
| _obviously_ ludicrous at the time. Perhaps with hindsight
| it seems as ludicrous as a belief in alchemy in the
| middle ages, but it wasn 't obvious that you couldn't
| turn lead into gold before we had chemistry. In the Web
| 2.0 era lots of smart people thought social media could
| make the world better. I raised money and founded a
| "social media" startup expressly thinking it would
| empower people, and many of my peers in that world were
| equally earnest.
| nindalf wrote:
| I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg
| can't log in on new devices anymore. That's because of the
| thousands of attempts per second to log into his account.
| Those attempts happen _because_ he's a celebrity. His
| experience is objectively different because of who he is.
|
| It's the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his
| profile is reported for any number of violations by people
| who don't like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100
| reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar's won't be.
|
| I don't know how every Integrity system could be modified to
| make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how
| to codify it in a way that would seem "fair". If you have an
| idea for a better way, you should share it.
| irq-1 wrote:
| > Those attempts happen because he's a celebrity. His
| experience is objectively different because of who he is.
|
| Then the rules should be different, like Twitter giving a
| blue check mark. If there are accounts that need to be
| treated differently then it should be clear why and how the
| rules are different. Fixing problems with tech (like not
| allowing Zuckerberg to login) should be the exception.
|
| Twitter caught hell for letting Trump break their rules
| because they pretended the rules were the same for
| everyone.
| tclancy wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're point really is. You keep harping
| on Zuckerberg not being able to log in on new devices but
| dismiss the entirety of the report _and_ the internal
| review as "Yeah, well, at scale there's nothing you can
| do." If that's the case, shut it off. We wouldn't accept
| that from a manufacturer of a physical product.
| solveit wrote:
| > We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a
| physical product.
|
| Not sure what the correct analog for physical product is,
| but we accept everything up to and including catastrophic
| failure resulting in deaths from physical products under
| the right circumstances, so you're going to have to be
| much more specific.
| nindalf wrote:
| Shut what off, exactly?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > If that's the case, shut it off.
|
| It should be obvious why "Shut Facebook off" is not in
| the domain of potential solutions Facebook will entertain
| to this technical challenge.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a
| physical product." - why not? I would think that any
| manufacturer of a physical product is clearly entitled to
| provide better service or better product versions or
| better legal conditions or better pricing for some of
| their customers if they want. And they definitely do so
| for various VIPs - some people pay to wear Nike shoes,
| and some people get paid millions to wear Nike shoes, and
| we do consider that a manufacturer of a physical product
| has the right to do that.
|
| There is not a trade principle of having to treat all
| customers equally (the sole exception being not denying
| service for a specific list of protected groups), and
| there is a general principle that people can trade with
| others as they please and provide different conditions
| for arbitrary reasons.
| shuntress wrote:
| >If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.
|
| I'm certain that the other poster won't present some kind
| of practical outline because part-way through the
| brainstorming they will realize they are designing a
| "Social Credit Score" and become too frustrated to
| continue.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Maybe normal users also shouldn't be able to have their
| accounts destroyed by a hundred spurious reports.
|
| Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a
| business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for
| weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in
| the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a
| normal person."
| [deleted]
| therealcamino wrote:
| > It's the same with Neymar. How many times do you think
| his profile is reported for any number of violations by
| people who don't like him? If an ordinary persons account
| got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar's
| won't be.
|
| More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct
| and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting
| revenge porn, his account _still_ wasn 't taken down. And
| that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate --
| it is a double standard.
|
| From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook
| data scientist was blunter: "Facebook routinely makes
| exceptions for powerful actors."'
|
| (Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this
| already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| This may be a naive question, but isn't that a problem with
| the content reporting system itself? That it requires
| blanket exceptions?
|
| Popular users are going to have more false-positive reports
| than others, but when those reports deviate from the norm
| on individual pieces of content (say a nude photo) then the
| system should still be able to pick it up. It's an exercise
| in feature extraction.
|
| The login blanket exception (for the CEO of the company) is
| a different use case and purpose than content control, one
| that blanket exceptions can solve efficiently.
| otterley wrote:
| I concede that some accounts probably deserve that specific
| type of protection. However, it doesn't explain the other
| kinds of protections these people have, including exemption
| from content-based rules. Those are the issues of real
| concern.
| nindalf wrote:
| The fact that the content couldn't be taken down was a
| bug. I feel like you, the author and most critics of Big
| Tech discount the possibility of bugs existing.
| otterley wrote:
| I'm sure you've read the old fable of "The Boy Who Cried
| Wolf." Facebook has made voluntary decisions at the
| highest levels, reported over the course of the past
| decade, to shield certain people from its content rules
| that apply to the general public. So if it was a bug this
| time (and I have no reason to believe that it wasn't),
| I'm sure you can understand people's skepticism about it.
|
| Moreover, I assume this bug was reported internally,
| probably pretty quickly. How long did it take to get
| fixed? If the fix wasn't prioritized and corrected
| within, say, a day (along with a regression test to
| ensure it never happens again!), then that would be
| pretty damning of the company's culture and priorities as
| well.
| asveikau wrote:
| But facebook comes across as unwilling and uninterested
| to fix the bugs in cases like these. Sometimes, even, the
| bugs themselves seem to surface resulting from
| fundamentally misstructuring the problem.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute
| it would be taken down. Neymar's won't be.
|
| Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the
| number of times this happens for normal users is
| significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why
| is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal
| with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of
| people annoyed.
| gwright wrote:
| > Social media was supposed to help level the playing field
| of society,
|
| Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a
| plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help".
|
| As with most things of consequence in our world, social media
| is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned
| effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide
| a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.
| vasco wrote:
| > plebiscite
|
| > the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an
| important public question such as a change in the
| constitution.
|
| > ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly.
|
| saved you a click
| 13years wrote:
| It is exactly what you would expect from such concentration of
| power and influence.
|
| What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't
| aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the
| tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.
| [deleted]
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| On social media, all voices are equal. Some voices are more equal
| than others. (apologies to Orwell)
| hapless wrote:
| Facebook are infamous liars, but journalists keep covering
| Facebook as if their various PR statements are true
|
| This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been
| caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have
| ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, _ever_ changes
|
| Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or
| investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting the
| public, journalists are shocked, _shocked_ that FB would do
| something like this.
| gverrilla wrote:
| journalism is a very corrupt industry
| dralley wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5CTxckRywg&t=2543s
| Camillo wrote:
| So it's like the bluecheck on Twitter, but not visible to users?
| tomp wrote:
| Almost the same as the COVID restrictions.
|
| Why? Because the public wants restrictions to feel safe, while
| the elite wants to be free and independent. Each gets what they
| want.
| adolph wrote:
| We all live in Jenny Holzer's world, "Abuse of power should come
| as no surprise" edition:
|
| https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I suspect you would find the same of Twitter.
| Rachelholt67 wrote:
| Having a bad credit can really cause you a lot , I had a very bad
| credit of 460 but it was later fixed by DOOMHACKS@BK.RU , They
| boosted my credit to 810 in all three bureaus .. They made me
| believe in credit hacks again after i have been ripped off
| several times trying to get my credit fixed .. Reach out to them
| if you need yours fixed as well +1 812 509 3064
| caseysoftware wrote:
| How does this track against Section 230?
|
| Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting
| people from the rules - _aka selectively enforcing their own TOS
| /AUP_ - does that change their standing and protections?
| pmyteh wrote:
| No. All that s.230 does is declare that platforms are not the
| 'publisher or speaker' of content provided by another
| 'information content provider'. It isn't a common carrier
| provision, so platforms are allowed to make whatever decisions
| they like about which people they're willing to host, or what
| TOS/AUP they want to enforce.
|
| For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people
| are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it
| means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as
| it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed
| (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing
| _what is_ and _what ought to be_ is a hugely annoying feature
| of many armchair legal analysts.
| adolph wrote:
| > confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying
| feature of many armchair legal analysts
|
| To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law
| itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then
| what form of law would be needed?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| that article 230 flies in the face of all reason nowadays.
| why it still exists is an american mystery
| criddell wrote:
| In what sense is Facebook not a publisher? Their algorithm
| acts as an editor, choosing what to show me. If they had a
| simple chronological feed, then the platform argument would
| make sense.
|
| If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were
| selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a
| publisher?
| jcranmer wrote:
| The "publisher" versus "platform" distinction is 100% a
| made-up distinction to motivate bad SS230 takes.
|
| What SS230 does, very simply, is say that websites posting
| user-generated content are not liable for that content,
| _even_ if they moderate the content. It was passed in
| response to a pair of court decisions that concluded that a
| website that moderated content (including, for example,
| weeding out profanity or pornography) was liable for all
| content posted, and a website that provided no moderation
| whatsoever wasn 't liable.
| criddell wrote:
| Thanks for clarification.
|
| I finally looked up the actual text of SS230 and it says
| this:
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
| information provided by another information content
| provider.
|
| So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles they
| generate but I suppose they would get a pass for anything
| they re-publish (like from a wire service).
| pmyteh wrote:
| > So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles
| they generate but I suppose they would get a pass for
| anything they re-publish (like from a wire service).
|
| Exactly. Though, interestingly, the second part of your
| statement is only true for the online edition. For NYT-
| on-paper, they're liable for all of it. The same with the
| comments section: online, it's covered by s.230; offline,
| the 'letters to the editor' section in print is the
| responsibility of the paper.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Because s.230 expressly provides for them not to be treated
| as one. The worry at the time was that information services
| making editorial decisions (taking down harmful content, in
| particular) would be treated as publishers, and so liable
| for what was left up. That creates an obvious moral hazard
| problem, encouraging bulletin boards and web hosts to
| refuse to even look at what's being posted, to avoid
| liability. So s.230 was added to the Communications Decency
| Act to make clear that the legal responsibility would fall
| _only_ on those originally providing the information.
|
| This situation isn't mirrored outside the US, FWIW. IIRC
| England & Wales will impose liability for libels etc., but
| only if the host had actual or constructive knowledge of
| the content of the post and chose to let it stay up. That
| introduces quite a lot of legal uncertainty and a bias
| towards deleting controversial material but may be better
| overall. I don't really know.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Many discussions are explicitly about what S230 ought to be
| though, not what it is. Most discussions I've seen start out
| by stating it was made for a 1996 bulletin board and is
| dated. It's long overdue to handle this blanket immunity
| that's being abused by social media behemoths.
|
| You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law
| and something is being abused.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Sure. And people writing 's.230 allows Facebook to have its
| cake and eat it, by allowing them to control their content
| and yet have immunity from responsibility for that which
| they choose to leave up' have a point. But there's an
| _awful_ lot of people arguing that this or that moderation
| decision means that Facebook 'have now moved from being a
| platform to a publisher' and should be sued. Normally when
| Facebook have taken down something the commentator agrees
| with, or have left up something they think is harmful.
|
| s.230 has no platform/publisher trade-off. If you're an
| intermediary and not the original information provider you
| are _expressly not the speaker or publisher_ , irrespective
| of your editorial choices. That's the _whole point_ of the
| provision. And it 's really straightforward. A lot of
| people seem to want to muddy the waters, and they
| shouldn't.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Thanks for the additional context.
|
| As written, nothing changes with this not-revelation,
| revelation with respect to Section 230. It does recolor
| some of their statements about consistent treatment and
| enforcement but those are other matters.
| [deleted]
| runako wrote:
| IANAL, but Section 230 reads pretty clearly to me. Which part
| of 230 do you think might apply here?
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
| owl_troupe wrote:
| The distinction lies in whether the service provider has
| rendered themselves a "publisher" under 230. The protection
| has historically been broadly interpreted but, in theory,
| Facebook could lose the protection if it chose, selectively,
| what content to promote or remove in violation of its own
| public TOS. Generally:
|
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306
| pkilgore wrote:
| You have case law for this claim? Or hell, I'll take a
| quote from your "source" you think supports it.
|
| (that's a trick question: No such case exists. What you say
| is not the law -- for anyone interested in a more-
| entertaining version summarizing the state of the law in
| this area than court decisions and statues, check out https
| ://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...)
| [deleted]
| runako wrote:
| From a discussion of case history provided by your helpful
| link:
|
| "Generally, courts have said that a service's ability to
| control the content that others post on its website is not
| enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a
| content developer."
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I have some theories but was hoping someone better informed
| than me would comment so I could learn more first and come to
| a more thoughtful position even if it's "not applicable".
|
| But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.
| killion wrote:
| Here is the Apple News link. If you have News+ you can read the
| article...
|
| https://apple.news/A7aEPaMT1SOSmVLGU7J_EOQ
| sdrawkcabmai wrote:
| Paywalled unfortunately. found this summary one:
|
| https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...
| acdha wrote:
| Somewhat ironically, changing the domain to fullwsj.com will
| redirect you to wsj.com stories via Facebook's redirector and
| that's currently not paywalled.
| markstos wrote:
| Tried it, got paywalled anyway. I was not logged into
| Facebook at the time, if that matters.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| https://archive.is/K5yv5
| msteffen wrote:
| It seems like no one has figured out a good system for moderation
| on the internet.
|
| IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that
| that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases,
| and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and
| rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news
| stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs.
| Reddit tried to federate moderation, but it's since become clear
| that all top subreddits are moderated by the same people. Even HN
| only works because dang busts ass to keep it good, and that has
| obvious limits (what happens when dang goes on vacation or
| retires?)
| bambax wrote:
| I think part of the problem of "moderation" is exposition, and
| incentives to maximize user engagement. Posts that nibody sees
| don't need to be moderated. The problem comes from the fact
| that platforms offer the most visibility to the worst content,
| because getting users riled up, excited or upset is the core of
| their business. It's their only business.
|
| Maybe moderation could be solved by regulating the number of
| likes or reposts a given user can make or a givzn post can
| receive. Seems a little far-fetched but worth thinking about.
| nradov wrote:
| HN only works because YC doesn't sell ads and explicitly treats
| it as a loss leader to support their investing business.
| asdff wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprise if they turn a profit on YC running
| sentiment analysis. The website seems like it isn't the most
| expensive to host either.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I don't think universal moderation (a moderation standard
| across all users) is possible or even desirable.
|
| Different users want different things. There are users who
| never want a single even mildly insulting word. There are users
| who want unlimited freedom.
|
| The best you can do is to break down moderation and let people
| opt into a level and form of moderation. Tell them upfront what
| they are getting and let them pick (or let them make their own
| moderation rules that apply clientside).
| 10000truths wrote:
| The common denominator in platforms going to shit is scale.
|
| Most social media platforms get their initial users by
| targeting a specific niche or demographic. Forums of olde
| typically revolved around some specific subject matter (e.g a
| particular game, or band, or subculture). Facebook targeted
| college students. Reddit targeted techies. But once the
| platform reaches some critical threshold of popularity, the
| platform strays from its vision to realize some commercial
| potential. The admins and moderators, in the interest of
| growth, try to appeal to a lowest common denominator, which
| ends up alienating the now-veterans, and the original purpose
| of the platform is diluted into obscurity.
| solveit wrote:
| The only systems that have figured out moderation at scale are
| Wikipedia and StackExchange. But see what HN thinks about that.
|
| Nobody wants to admit that the only type of moderation that
| actually works at scale is an entrenched group of somewhat-
| expert overly-attached users gatekeeping contributions with
| (what looks like to the novice and sometimes even to the
| established user) extreme prejudice on a website with
| intentionally highly limited scope.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Reddit could change their TOS tomorrow to prevent users from
| moderating more than 2 subreddits if they wanted; others would
| take their place. But the mods of subreddits that have not been
| banned are advertiser friendly.
| idrios wrote:
| Ironically, HN's great moderation caused it to become very
| popular, which has made the task of moderating it all much more
| difficult, which is having a noticeable effect on discussions
| and which articles make it to the front page.
| maccolgan wrote:
| I fear the day when dang retires.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| "In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show
| nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of
| millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook."
|
| Ouch
| egberts1 wrote:
| my Facebook account got closed because they're demanding my phone
| number and i won't supply it.
| jmull wrote:
| This was very obvious already (though it's good they did the
| reporting). We all watched certain high-profile users flouting
| the rules constantly.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Another week, another detailed account of the hubristic
| sociopathic amoral culture that defines this firm.
|
| If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them,
| you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you
| should find another mechanism to stay in touch.
|
| Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war
| that is currently destroying the west.
| rvz wrote:
| Facebook IS the problem. Discuss.
| [deleted]
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Perhaps it's just me, but reddit front page is much more toxic
| and filled with misinformation compared to most Facebook
| groups. (Niche subs are really good though).
| rvz wrote:
| The biggest one in terms of users is Facebook. Everyone has
| given Facebook so many chances to change for years and yet,
| they are incapable of changing.
|
| Not even the fines are scaring them. They are so tiny, they
| are laughing at them whilst they rake in billions in revenue.
|
| They will never change and it will only get worse. They are
| the problem.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If what fb does makes tons of money and doesn't break the
| law, why would you expect them to change? And sure you can
| say well change the law. But the law that lets them do it
| is the 1st amendment.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| That depends heavily on what subreddits you subscribe to,
| though. If you unsubscribe most of the news and politics
| subs, it can be pretty nice.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm not sure how we can ever expect FB to treat everyone fairly;
| there isn't a system on earth which does so, including any
| judiciary ever. Imagine that I were treated the same as a
| president or king.
| paulluuk wrote:
| Why should you be treated worse than a president or king?
| nradov wrote:
| Because Facebook is a for-profit private business, not a
| charity or government.
| mbostleman wrote:
| All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
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