[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Dis the Sopranos? Machine Learning Put Me o...
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Tell HN: Dis the Sopranos? Machine Learning Put Me on Facebook
Suicide Watch
Three years ago I posted a 'Change my mind' meme on Facebook
dissing The Sopranos. Today FB says my post violated community
standards and directs me to resources about self-harm and suicide.
Officially I can't advertise or go live for 30 days (don't do
either anyways). Unofficially, my posts are no longer showing up in
my own feed nor anyone else's. Were I actually at risk of self-
harm, I struggle to imagine how socially isolating me is a proper
response. Warning and original post:
https://i.imgur.com/2kzCEza.png Restrictions:
https://i.imgur.com/VHCWfbt.png
Author : tbyehl
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-07-16 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Meanwhile, a friend was posting suicide notes on Facebook, and
| Facebook did nothing about it. She was already in a hospital, but
| for some reason she had access to her phone for a while.
|
| She also posted a fake death announcement by her mom. Then
| attempted suicide, and was in ICU for a few days. People were
| engaging a lot, freaking out.
|
| So yeah, Facebook fails miserably at everything.
| ev1 wrote:
| Does Facebook really consider this a failure if it increased
| clicks and engagement? Something to think about.
| exikyut wrote:
| Hmm.
|
| Ostensibly Facebook has a party line and attendant menagerie
| of moderation and AI tooling as a broad response to self-
| harm, but at the end of the day all of that has its box to
| work within, and thinking and breathing this one subject does
| not define Facebook's identity and core DNA. And that may be
| the core of the problem.
|
| I wonder if the auto-assessment ML model passed right on by
| the described post *precisely because* the "clicks and
| engagement" ranked it as "good", where "good", intentionally
| or otherwise, has wound up becoming the TensorFlow
| distillation of "not our problem"... because *that* is where
| the focal point, the emergent foundation everything else
| finds itself orbiting around, at the end of the day.
|
| From the angle I'm squinting at this from, this situation
| seems unsustainable intractable. FB is attempting to
| "benignly police" N billion people at once in an effort to
| monetize a private (non-government, publicly-traded),
| commercially-delivered digital town square experience. IMHO
| there is no global point of cohesion that can encapsulate
| this effort, which is trying to unify multiple fundamentally
| incompatible dimensions at once. It doesn't work.
| ev1 wrote:
| A real death notice removed as targeted harassment would
| also probably result in some form of public relations
| nightmare. It's not like the ML model will know about the
| severe and difficult to reverse reputational damage of a
| fake harassment death notice.
| jart wrote:
| > Were I actually at risk of self-harm, I struggle to imagine how
| socially isolating me is a proper response.
|
| I'm going to put on my cynical hat here, but I think you have a
| perfectly reasonable expectation. Human communities evolved in
| such a way that everyone knew everyone. If one person got sick,
| then the community was just as concerned for the individual as
| they were for risk it posed to the community.
|
| Now, I'm not sure how it came to pass that giant tech companies
| like Facebook got landed with the responsibility of community
| shepherding and management (rather than being telecommunications
| carriers) but it's not a role Facebook should be doing, because
| at that scale, the people who are unhealthy are going to be
| treated like a defective unit, which needs to be pulled out of
| service and replaced, so the machine as a whole can keep humming.
|
| Simple fact is that Facebook is a website, and a website can't
| care about you or anyone else for that matter, because it's just
| a website. But now that we're all socially subordinated to a
| website that controls the means by which we communicate with
| friends, family, and loved ones, I think we're going to see a lot
| more of this sort of lack of compassion becoming endemic to
| humanity.
| djur wrote:
| I believe this restriction is meant more for people who are
| advocating self-harm ("kill yourself" memes and the like), which
| explains the isolation. I don't know how Facebook handles it, but
| on Twitter I've received different algorithmic responses for "we
| think you referred to hurting yourself" vs "we think you told
| someone to hurt themselves". (Both of these were
| misinterpretations by the algorithm.) In the former case, my
| account did not get locked down, I just got offered resources.
|
| There was obviously a pretty egregious mistake in your case.
| Hopefully you can get a quick reversal.
| [deleted]
| pridkett wrote:
| Facebook, in general, has swung too far on the ML for moderation
| side. Last year when vaccinations for kids first 12-18 became
| available I posted "It's time to stab...er jab the kids". That
| got my account locked so hard I needed to contact a friend inside
| Facebook to get it fixed. To this day I still have a strike on my
| account for inciting violence or something stupid like that.
|
| I'd honestly rather suffer a shadow ban than know just how bad
| their ML is for this use case.
| tbyehl wrote:
| Around that timeframe I got 30 days for hate speech for
| commenting on a meme about little boys being evil by saying
| that 'little girls are also pure concentrated evil.'
| rasz wrote:
| Meme was funny.
|
| FB reaction even funnier.
|
| Now to top FB reaction you should hire a lawyer and sue them for
| emotional damage - FB bogus warning and cutting off from friends
| and family made you really think you are suicidal!
| jaclaz wrote:
| Assuming that your post is actually a valid indicator of a risk
| of self-harm and suicide, three years can hardly be described as
| "in a timely manner", even if it was appropriate to point you to
| those resources, it makes no sense to do so three years later.
|
| BTW I cannot see how the posted meme can be connected to risk of
| self-harm and suicide, am I missing some reference?
| the_only_law wrote:
| > am I missing some reference?
|
| Some of these moderation algorithms are pretty stupid/over
| zealous.
|
| I was watching a follow-up on the YouTube elsagate crisis that
| happened some years back, and apparently one of their late
| solutions to the problems ended up deleting anything with tags
| or titles that could be remotely connected to children's
| animation, resulting in a ton of being videos being struck
| down.
|
| Also, when the "fact checking" was released on FB and
| Instagram, obvious memes and obvious bait (literally explicitly
| stating it was bait) were being "fact checked".
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yes, what I don't understand is the possible (even if wrong)
| connection that the algorithms may have established between
| the specific meme and suicide.
|
| Is the "change my mind" or the "Sopranos" that may trigger
| the algorithm?
|
| Or are _all_ memes associated to self-harm /suicide?
| h2odragon wrote:
| At least they're not (yet) legally obligated to report you to
| "authorities" of some kind for readjustment and help. Right? This
| still falls under the usual customer service standards of "their
| site, their rules, shut up you're just the chum"
| ipaddr wrote:
| How close are we to that? One press release away.
| desindol wrote:
| Someone reported your post for self-harm/suicidal tendencies.
| It's a pest on reddit and is spreading to other social networks
| as a form of retaliation or disagreement and most of them handle
| it like dmca requests... better safe than sorry.
| Shorel wrote:
| This is the correct answer. It is a group of people reporting
| the post, not ML, the cause of this problem.
| tbyehl wrote:
| Doubtful. My FB posts are restricted to friends-only, my FB
| friends are actual people I have more than a cursory
| meatspace connection with, and the post is over 3 years old.
| It's improbable that, if one of them wanted to troll me, they
| would dig that deep -- and, tbh, they wouldn't need to.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| You'd be surprised what some people are capable of doing.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The "grumpy cat" meme is also being flagged as about "suicide or
| self-injury":
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/vzizhu/apparently...
|
| It's not just this one person on Reddit, either. Someone I know
| personally also had the grumpy cat removed from their timeline
| for the same reason.
| tbyehl wrote:
| If they're going after Grump Cat memes too, my account is
| doomed.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I struggle to imagine how socially isolating me is a proper
| response
|
| Wild guess, but I'd guess it's more of a protection from some
| sort of liability for them, as opposed to protecting you.
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(page generated 2022-07-16 23:02 UTC)