[HN Gopher] Facebook kept its own oversight board in the dark on...
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Facebook kept its own oversight board in the dark on program for
VIP users
Author : hoppyhoppy2
Score : 233 points
Date : 2021-10-21 12:42 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I believe the link to the actual report announcement is
| https://oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-bo...
| and the actual report is at
| https://oversightboard.com/attachment/987339525145573/
| alex_c wrote:
| >Between October 2020 and the end of June 2021, Facebook and
| Instagram users had submitted around 524,000 cases to the
| Board. [...] Facebook also submitted 35 cases.
|
| >In total, the Board selected 21 cases to review and ultimately
| proceeded with 17 of these. By the end of June, the Board had
| decided 11 cases - overturning Facebook's decision eight times
| and upholding it three times.
|
| >On average it took 74 days to decide and implement these
| cases.
|
| Wow.
| klyrs wrote:
| If this is a paid position, I'd like to apply for the
| obviously-necessary oversight board oversight board. We'd
| spend no less than 700 days to decide on cases, to be extra
| thorough.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I wonder what happened to those four cases the board
| "selected" but didn't "ultimately proceed" with?
| ch33zer wrote:
| Why should we care what this board has to say? It's an attempt by
| Facebook to be bound by rules that they wrote, instead of rules
| written by Congress. I don't see a reason to pay them any mind.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This is called "plausible deniability"
|
| Their board knew, and approved.
| dthakur wrote:
| I don't like facebook the product, but I think they are being
| dunked on, too unfairly recently.
|
| However, I'm most amazed and impressed how facebook has created a
| team -- likely compensated in FB equity -- and then convinced the
| world that the team is an "oversight board".
| jacquesm wrote:
| On the contrary, I think they're being treated way too lenient.
| xixixao wrote:
| The board is not compensated in equity, nor are they employees,
| nor they can be fired based on their decisions.
|
| The reasons fb gets dunked on (among others) is because people
| in comment sections are too lazy to spend 10 seconds to Google
| a bit of research:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-facebooks-oversight...
| dthakur wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying.
| kfprt wrote:
| In Facebook land some animals are more equal than others and
| their pseudo government is ineffectual because a secret program
| pulls all the strings. I'm sure this isn't analogous to the rest
| of the world.
| ryeights wrote:
| The entire concept of a Facebook-created "Facebook Oversight
| Board" is a total joke, and I cannot understand why anyone has
| taken it seriously ever.
|
| </story>
| alex_c wrote:
| >Facebook failed to provide crucial details about its "Cross-
| Check" program that reportedly shielded millions of VIP users
| from the social media platform's normal content moderation rules,
| according to the company's oversight board.
|
| >Facebook told the oversight board that the program applied only
| "to a small number of decisions," which the company subsequently
| acknowledged was misleading
|
| Indeed. Millions of users is a tiny fraction of Facebook's total
| user count, so in terms of absolute numbers it is probably a
| relatively small number of content.
|
| But in terms of reach and influence, I would expect the VIP users
| to have by far a disproportionately large share. I would also
| expect them to be the most likely to post content that would end
| up in front of an oversight board. But of course, they are also
| the ones most able to raise a stink if Facebook moderates their
| content...
| changoplatanero wrote:
| I don't get what the big deal is here. If you fly United a lot
| then you will get premium service. It's in recognition of how
| much money you are making for their business and how much they
| value keeping you as a customer. Similarly, if you build a
| large audience on Facebook then you get premium service in
| content moderating and its in recognition of how important you
| are to their business.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Presumably the people tasked with overseeing United's
| decisions are not given misleading information about the
| extent of United's programs for VIP customers.
| barelysapient wrote:
| I guess its not much of an oversight board then!
|
| The number of accounts under the program versus not I think
| misses the point. Facebook has separate rules that a privileged
| few get to play by. So privileged in fact, that their self
| appointed overseers didn't in fact oversee.
|
| And these board members? What a joke. A kangaroo board. How
| embarrassing for those board members.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| My understanding is that part of the reason these accounts
| were on a special list is that they were getting reported a
| lot. For nothing.
|
| Like, Doug The Pug might get reported a thousand times per
| post for animal abuse.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > I guess its not much of an oversight board then!
|
| FB's "oversight boards" are to check a box saying they have
| oversight boards, nothing more.
|
| I have no insider knowledge here, I'm looking at FB as a
| black box whose insides can only be deduced by the inputs and
| outputs, mind.
| tremon wrote:
| Well, they didn't call it an "oversight" board for nothing...
| fatjokes wrote:
| Not much of a VIP either! Millions of them...
|
| I'm partly joking. Out of billions of users it's still one in
| thousands.
| amichal wrote:
| 1/1000 errors/bugs/exceptions are still a big deal in my
| book! I have a relative who worked in high volume
| manufacturing. Uncaught errors that could hurt people were
| still a problem even if they could in theory happen at
| 10^-7 if you are making billions of something...
| obmelvin wrote:
| Yes, relatively it is a low amount...but at first glance it
| feels crazy that millions would get VIP status
| kfprt wrote:
| The board members were chosen for their placating potential
| not any governance capacity.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| They said "to a small number of decisions", and NOT "to a small
| _percent_ of decisions".
|
| Millions of accounts - and likely tens of millions of decisions
| stemming from those accounts - is not a small _number_.
| titzer wrote:
| Rules for thee and not for me.
|
| It's just more of Facebook's desperate attempt to stay relevant
| and appease the most toxic "influencers" to keep their revenue
| going up and justify their absurd market valuation.
| jmspring wrote:
| LET THEM EAT LIKES!
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Facebook price/earnings is ~25. How is that an absurd market
| valuation?
|
| I don't think this xcheck system is designed to appease the
| most toxic influencers unless you consider people like
| Cristiano Ronaldo or Ariana Grande toxic.
| titzer wrote:
| P/E is meaningless because it doesn't normalize to the number
| of shares. What you want is the price to sales ratio, which
| normalizes for market cap. And yeah, tech stocks are
| ridiculously overinflated compared to every other sector of
| the economy. Facebook ranks #3 in P/S ratio even in the tech
| industry.
|
| So yeah, it's an absurd market valuation based on speculation
| of growth.
| mrfox321 wrote:
| P/E does normalize by market cap.
|
| Earnings is actually earnings per share.
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How is P/E not normalized? IT is literally the ratio of a
| company's share (stock) price to the company's earnings per
| share
| arresthimnow wrote:
| NIH admits Fauci lied to congress and _FUNDED COVID-19_
|
| https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fauci-lied-knowingly-willf...
| harryf wrote:
| > The program had mushroomed to include 5.8 million users in 2020
|
| Interesting number. Wonder if that gives us a rough idea of the
| global ratio of celebrities to normal people?
|
| 8 billion people on the planet vs. 5.8 million celebs means there
| are on average ~ 1500 normal people for every celebrity?
|
| Seems kinda low... or that there are way too many users Facebook
| regards as "high profile".
|
| The ratio gets even more suspect when you remember Facebook
| "only" has 3 billion monthly users (src
| https://backlinko.com/facebook-users) ... 517 normal people for
| every celeb
| csense wrote:
| I don't usually apologize for Facebook, but I wonder whether it
| might actually be a good-faith attempt by Facebook to provide
| good quality moderation.
|
| If having human moderation costs too much to scale to everything,
| do you throw up our arms and say humans will moderate nothing and
| it's entirely up to bots? Or do you still put some limited
| resources into human moderation that could check 0.1% of content,
| then have some algorithm that picks what content the human
| moderation gets applied to?
|
| If you go that route, you might be very tempted to try to design
| the algorithm for picking which 0.1% of content goes to the
| humans to try to pick "important" content. Because you want to
| apply your limited human moderation resources to content that's
| "important" to get right or will be "impactful" for large numbers
| of people or the trajectory of an entire society.
|
| I understand why this angers people. Facebook might see it in
| terms of deploying limited moderation resources in the most
| effective way. But suppose you're an "ordinary" person who gets
| posts deleted, accounts locked, etc. by bots for no discernable
| reason with no appeal. As an "ordinary" person, learning
| "important" people have a different, more forgiving justice
| system where actual humans make decisions is going to make you
| pretty angry.
|
| I'm not sure it's malicious intent on Facebook's part.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The point here is that their oversight board needs to know
| about these sorts of programs, not that the program is de facto
| bad.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Also, the program is bad though.
|
| We know nothing about who chooses the members of the VIP
| club, there were cases of harassment and incitement to
| violence that went unchecked, and they purposely hid
| knowledge of the program for their own oversight board - even
| though they appointed the board themselves.
|
| That's all quite, quite bad, to say nothing of the base
| inequality at he heart of it. They tried to hand-wave that
| away with this absurd line, saying the program was to:
|
| > "create an additional step so we can accurately enforce
| policies on content that could require more understanding"
|
| - dude, that's just saying that their chosen VIPs deserve
| more understanding, for some reason; in response to serious
| charges that the 'VIP's were inciting violence and harassing
| others.
| landemva wrote:
| US government went after Microsoft for antitrust years ago, which
| resulted in Bill Gates leaving MS. It's time for similar action
| against Facebook.
| jmspring wrote:
| Bill Gates "didn't leave Microsoft" as a result of anti-trust.
|
| He stepped down as CEO in 2000, but remained as Chairman for
| years after.
| smoldesu wrote:
| ...and Amazon, then Netflix, then Apple, and maybe Google too.
| annadane wrote:
| No. Stop it with the false equivalence. Facebook is
| absolutely one of the worst and they need to go after them
| first
|
| Edit: downvotes from shills.
| galbar wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what did Netflix do? I'm most
| certainly out of the loop here
| emsy wrote:
| Oh we're talking about antitrust, quick name all of FAANG!
| dcveloper wrote:
| It had Dave Chappelle. So it must be canceled by any means
| necessary. </s>
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I'm not aware of any egregiously anticompetitive behavior
| on their part and they certainly fall well short of market
| dominance.
|
| Disney would be a more likely, though still unlikely,
| lightning rod for apparently having sold their streaming
| service as a "loss leader" and having purchased lots and
| lots of copyrights and trademarks which they subsequently
| made exclusive, directly causing the termination of Netflix
| programs in some cases.
| annadane wrote:
| Correct.
| ldbooth wrote:
| the oversight board was always a PR tactic. Zuck is the common
| denominator, expect more of the same bad faith and sociopathic
| tendencies. Scott Galloway has accurate critiques of these
| shenanigans.
| marricks wrote:
| I'm still amazed that anyone buys into the idea of internal
| oversight. At best it's a bunch of well intentioned employees who
| may find things and make the company more ethical who will
| eventually be axed by executives for doing their job (see Timnet
| Gebru).
|
| Useful oversight has to come from external sources, particular by
| those most affected by your actions. Doesn't have to be entirely
| cut throat but god how often do schools let kids grade their own
| homework?
|
| Big companies only make things like these so they can avoid
| external oversight. Then the Senators they buy off can say "Oh
| we'll step in when needed but it looks like they're trying."
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Interestingly, I saw a TV ad from Facebook today saying they're
| asking Congress to establish "rules of the road" for social
| media companies. More about their ads and possible motivations
| discussed at https://themarkup.org/ask-the-
| markup/2021/09/16/what-does-fa...
| philistine wrote:
| Imagine there's a dude, who last year was viral for a month
| because of his dog or something. Now he gets into this shadow VIP
| group because anything he posts goes viral for a good while, but
| as is the case with anything viral, it dies down.
|
| Now this dude gets an easier time harassing people, breaking
| Facebook's rules and being a jackass on their website, just
| because of his damn dog. This is creepy.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| That's not how this works. If anything he will be caught sooner
| because he's in xcheck.
| [deleted]
| scohesc wrote:
| The Facebook Oversight Board sounds like a bunch of creepy
| silhouettes in a darkened boardroom moving pawns on a figurative
| chessboard.
| gadders wrote:
| It's a sinecure for failed politicians and academics.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| sounds like a bunch of people getting paid for doing nothing
| kfprt wrote:
| Paid to lobby their friends in the media not to criticize the
| company too harshly. I'd say money well spent.
| fforflo wrote:
| "World Government" in One Piece
| suprfsat wrote:
| "Peter Thiel" in the 2010 film The Social Network
| raj2569 wrote:
| VIP users looks eerie after squid games!
| suprfsat wrote:
| Truly this is like an episode of black mirror.
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(page generated 2021-10-21 23:01 UTC)