[HN Gopher] Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
___________________________________________________________________
Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
Author : joeyh
Score : 199 points
Date : 2023-10-07 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erinkissane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (erinkissane.com)
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > There are a lot of posts about Rohingya men raping, forcibly
| marrying, beating, and murdering Buddhist women.
|
| (That quote comes from the description of the mechanics of the
| military's coordinated propaganda campaign.)
|
| I would like to share a PSA in the truest sense of that acronym.
| I suggest building an automatic bullshit indicator in your brain
| whenever you see any content along the lines of "they're harming
| our women" from anyone. It may literally be the oldest trick in
| the propaganda book. Both sides used it extensively in WWI [1].
| It pops up a lot in the history of American slavery / racism as
| the idea that often directly sparked lynchings. I'm sure you can
| think up lots of other examples. Sorry if this is already obvious
| but over the years I keep seeing more and more examples of it and
| IMO this tactic doesn't seem to be as well-known as the technique
| of depicting the victims as an infestation of animal pests.
|
| [1] Example of USA propaganda from WWI
| https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/committee-on-public-...
| [deleted]
| blackoil wrote:
| I was just now reading exactly similar posts on reddit for
| Hamas and Israel.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| [flagged]
| andrepd wrote:
| >Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc?
|
| What a wild take. "Nazism", "communism", and what is happening
| in Myanmar are three things with nothing in common whatsoever.
| What an absurd oversimplification.
|
| >Also, why is it always 'hate speech' when one side does it.
|
| It's not, my friend.
| rakoo wrote:
| I think you're mixing up "people in Myanmar" and "the Myanmar
| government". The post is primarily talking about the first one,
| and Facebook has had an effect on the first one.
|
| > Is it hate speech when we dehumanize nazis, communists, etc?
|
| Yes it is
|
| > So what erin wants is meta to serve as an anti-myanmar
| propaganda machine?
|
| What the author wants is that facebook doesn't propagate hate
| speech by putting it up in front just because it makes clicks
| and money. What the author wants is that when people report
| hate speech, facebook acts on it. What the author wants is to
| take on its responsibility as a facilitator to the genocide.
|
| > If she wants less suffering why doesn't she advocate that the
| UK, EU, US, etc stop trying to overthrow the government of
| myanmar?
|
| That's not the topic of the article. Please remain on topic.
|
| > It's funny because her article could be classified as hate
| speech by the people of myanmar. And why is this propaganda on
| HN?
|
| Everything is sourced. Not a single word in the articles calls
| for the hate of any people, not even Mark Zuckerberg. Please
| elaborate where you find hateful content.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This article uses Meta's own definition, next question
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > This article uses Meta's own definition, next question
|
| The definition meta was forced to adopt by the likes of the
| author. A nonsense definition. And it's not just meta, it's
| pretty much every american and european company was forced to
| adopt it. How amazing huh?
| catlover76 wrote:
| You're using a lot of words and terms you think make a point,
| and they aren't. There is no point in logically engaging with
| you. As you know, there is an actual genocide against Burmese
| Muslims by the Burmese government and large segments of its
| society. It's ongoing. You are pro-genocide.
|
| I don't even think you have anything against Burmese Muslims. I
| think people like you are moved to anger by others seeking to
| pursue good. Whoever the victim is, you have a disease of
| personality and spirit that causes you to attack attempts at
| sympathy or help towards them. Whatever the broader society or
| group values, you instinctively tear down.
|
| You think whenever someone wants to shed light on an injustice,
| you should shit on such an attempt mindlessly. Whenever someone
| wants to act altruistically, you want to make it seem like they
| aren't really being altruistic, that they must have some
| ulterior motive. Because you yourself aren't altruistic, and
| have no good, and don't care about the suffering of others.
|
| Why are you calling it propaganda? It's a well-documented
| article, whereas you spew stupidity. Who are you trying to fool
| by acting like the Burmese government is legitimate? Are a
| government like the North Korean one and the government that
| allows you to post the drivel you post freely alike?
|
| The rest of us needn't do anything but down vote you and avoid
| people like you in real life. It's not even a matter of
| understanding or misunderstanding something logically; you
| _know_ that the government of Burma is genocidal and
| oppressive, you _know_ that the government of Iran is
| oppressive and rising to ever new heights of brutality, etc,
| and you know that normal people rightly find that all wrong.
| But something inside you causes you to want to launch pathetic
| half-baked defenses of such evil in online posts. Something
| inside you is rotten and causes you to call a detailed post
| documenting a pretty evil paper trail from a major corporation
| --pretty stereotypically what we think good journalism should
| be, and which we get little of from most major publications--
| "propaganda".
| [deleted]
| gmerc wrote:
| This article is well sourced, transparent about definitions and
| data. It's a post child for high quality content.
|
| And you are rambling about propaganda, trying to move the
| question of the quality of reporting and data to "who is the
| author", some casual whataboutism about "why don't they do
| something else" and outright miss the point where the
| definition for hatespeech used is clearly the one Meta
| themselves defined.
|
| Then again your overall comment profile is just that, so if you
| want to make it about who is the author, you probably have to
| accept a "who are you"
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| > Isn't the problem in myanmar that we are trying to overthrow
| their government?
|
| What a ridiculous comment. Mynammar is in a civil war because
| their own people are trying to overthrow their government,
| which is oppressive and autocratic.
| mycologos wrote:
| OK, I spent ~an hour reading parts I [1], II [2], and III (TFA).
| My perception going in was that comment moderation is very hard,
| and essentially impossible at scale, and that Facebook/Meta
| cannot credibly be accused of literally causing genocide. Here is
| how my opinion shifted some after reading this series:
|
| The articles present a lot of evidence to support the notion that
| Facebook was well aware of clear-cut incitement to violence years
| before its escalation into large-scale genocide in late 2016. It
| isn't spelled out explicitly, but I think there are two things
| that make Facebook's initial apparent non-response easier to
| understand as incompetence rather than evil:
|
| * In the aftermath of the Arab spring, technology and social
| networks enjoyed a honeymoon in public perception that is hard to
| remember over a decade later. People, including (especially?)
| people in tech, could genuinely believe that making it easier for
| people to talk to each other was basically good, full stop. I'd
| suggest that this honeymoon only really ended after the 2016 US
| presidential election, which caused a lot of soul searching about
| information and echo chambers, and got even worse after the
| Cambridge Analytica scandal [3, this is a graph image from NBC
| news]
|
| * As part I of the article notes, "[t]he information landscape in
| Myanmar is so unstable that accounts of any given incident
| conflict, often in major ways". This dynamic seems to appear in a
| lot of places where well-off westerners interact with much poorer
| and more chaotic countries (Rwanda is a clear parallel). Part I
| points out that the "Burmese government" itself seems to make
| statements both fanning anger against the Rohingya and then
| trying to walk them back when it boils over into disorder
|
| So I think it was possible to be a basically well-intentioned
| (naive) Facebook employee in the leadup to 2016 and hear of
| strange, almost genocidal sounding posts in another language in a
| place you don't understand and still not think "this is a break-
| glass moment and I need to escalate and make a new path inside my
| corporation for this to be taken seriously". In hindsight, this
| was wrong, but I think we're forgetting that what happened next
| didn't seem possible, because we still thought of the internet as
| an exceptional new dawn in mass communication. A lot is necessary
| for people to process something as a novel, serious emergency.
|
| However, it's hard to maintain this judgment over the ensuing
| years, as senior figures at Facebook are repeatedly presented
| with evidence that people are deliberately distributing
| misinformation (e.g., making fake accounts, and other clear-cut
| evidence that doesn't require a fact checker and research) and
| mostly wave it away unless it's big enough to provoke media and
| investor consternation. By the end of the 2010s, I think Facebook
| was well past the "this sort of thing wasn't something we could
| imagine" stage of a crisis, and into a less defensible position
| along the lines of "this is reality, it cannot really be
| moderated, but we can pretend to moderate".
|
| One last point re: moderation, I have no idea how Meta hires its
| Burmese content moderators, but it must be tricky, since as far
| as I can tell _most people in Burma are anti-Rohingya_. I would
| like to be wrong about this, but what should be factually
| trustworthy sources like the Brookings institution write things
| like:
|
| > Most of the Myanmar population, especially the Buddhist
| majority, feels that the Rohingya don't belong in their country
| ... [t]he straightforward solution would be to help the Rohingya
| return to their homes in Myanmar and live in peace and freedom.
| Sadly, this solution looks impossible in the near term because of
| the nationalist sentiment of the Buddhist majority
|
| [1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
|
| [2] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis
|
| [3] https://media-
| cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f...
|
| [4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-
| myanmar-...
| gmerc wrote:
| The Senate hearing was really the final confirmation anyone
| needed our elected representatives are woefully outmatched.
|
| Calling out the simple statistic slight of hand would have been a
| sure fire way of establishing control and the impression of hard
| on big tech they wanted. It was delivered on a platter.
|
| Instead of that we got "Senator we run ads" and stupid gotcha
| games trying to prove FB was biased against conservatives when it
| was painfully clear that Joel Kaplan had fully taken over the
| bias department in favor of his friends (preventing
| misinformation action on the news surface because, shocker, it
| came 90% from conservative staples like Drudge report)
| theptip wrote:
| > the most generous number from the disclosed memos has Meta
| removing 5% of hate speech on Facebook. That would mean that for
| every 2,000 hateful posts or comments, Meta removes about 100-95
| automatically and 5 via user reports.
|
| Its really hard to contextualize these numbers. What are the
| comparable rates for other media?
|
| What % of hate speech on Mastodon is taken down? Twitter?
| YouTube? Discord? Comparing with old-school mob formation
| technology, what about leaflets handed out? Political rallies?
|
| Meta is an obvious target because they have such a high % of
| total online speech, and by virtue of this make a potentially
| impactful single intervention point to make things better. And
| these articles do make it seem they have room at the margin to
| improve. But imagine a word with multiple social networks per
| country - do we think they would be better or worse at policing
| this stuff (and crucially, the places where it matters are the
| developing less-regulated countries, often with governments that
| are at least disinterested in preventing the ethnic conflicts, if
| not actively promoting them)? I can see hand-wavey arguments in
| both directions but what I really want is data analyzing the
| question.
| arczyx wrote:
| Rather than the 5% number (which may be the best they can do
| with current start of art), what feels more damning to me is
| that they found a method that can reduce misinformation (by way
| more than 5%), and then decided to _rollback_ it.
|
| > And this method works. In Myanmar, "reshare depth demotion"
| reduced "viral inflammatory prevalence" by 25% and cut "photo
| misinformation" almost in half.
|
| > In a reasonable world, I think Meta would have decided to
| broaden use of this method and work on refining it to make it
| even more effective. What they did, though, was decide to roll
| it back within Myanmar as soon as the upcoming elections were
| over.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The free market has spoken, and it will gladly accept helping
| encourage a genocide in the name of profits.
| hef19898 wrote:
| One of the reasons real Communism (the USSR variety, not
| what people in the US think Communism is) has such a hard
| time in the capitalist societies: It is the only form of
| authoritarianism in which corporations cannot make profits.
| logicchains wrote:
| >It is the only form of authoritarianism in which
| corporations cannot make profits
|
| It's still the same people making the profits though.
| Regardless of what political/economic system you have,
| sociopaths will always gravitate towards whatever
| position allows them to acquire the most wealth and
| power. The only difference is whether they have the legal
| right to send men with guns to lock you up or kill you if
| you disobey them.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The fact that you lack the ability for creativity and
| nuance to such a degree that you scream "HAH, Stalin!"
| anytime someone criticizes the free market says more
| about you than the point you're arguing against.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I actually critized the free market for being totally
| fine with, e.g., fascism, or any kind of atrocoty as long
| as profits are to be made...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Surely you aren't asserting the Soviet Union committed no
| atrocities and was an angelic society of benevolent
| leaders blessing the harmonious proletariat?
|
| In any society composed of humans, the shitburgers will
| find a way to shit on the largest groups of people they
| can using whatever instrument of power is available. In
| the US it's dollars, in the USSR, its influence and
| power.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Does this "real" Communism exist anywhere, or should it
| be more aptly named fantasy Communism?
| blackoil wrote:
| What was the false positive rate? Blocking all posts about
| Israel and Palestine will bring down misinfo but that is
| rarely acceptable.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| We're talking about the case where there was an actual
| genocide happening, and Facebook was aware of it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Discord (and maybe Mastodon ??) don't operate through
| engagement, so I'm not sure why you put them on the list ?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The Facebook apologists always conveniently forget that
| Facebook's algorithms viralize content and decide what people
| see. I.e. the precise reason for their culpability.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in a
| case like Myanmar.
|
| First there would be the delay of the rest of the community
| understanding what was going on in an unusual language. Second
| there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and implementing
| an effective filtering policy. Third since there are multiple
| instances this can't be done in a consistent way across the
| network. Fourth they can't stop the Myanmar government from
| setting up its own Mastodon instances, blocking access to
| outside instances, etc.
|
| You'd better believe that if Modi keeps going down the road he
| is going on that India will kick out all western social media
| companies if they try to block his campaign of dehumanizing
| non-hindus.
|
| From my perspective there is a lot of harmful talk that goes on
| social media that falls short of hate speech. In terms of my
| own feed I have keyword blocks against most Republican primary
| candidates (not Nikki Haley though) and there are many other
| topics that I think people are not capable of having a civil
| and productive conversation on or that I just don't want to be
| exposed to. A lot of stuff on the slippery slope to "hate
| speech" is blocked by this and it is OK when I do it because it
| is my own feed, but you'd better believe there are lots of
| people who think they have something _so_ important to say that
| it would be crime to "censor" their shit (for lack of a better
| word) if the block affected more than just me.
|
| Unfortunately the discussion around A.I. is dominated by
| positions like: (1) ChatGPT is the God at the end of the
| universe that Teilhard de Chardin told us about, or (2) It was
| just fine that Google stole everybody's content for years and
| years but all of a sudden ChatGPT came out and be outraged all
| of a sudden at this rip-off.
|
| The truth about it is that machine learning algorithms over
| text have terrible performance, even the good ones. The
| performance curves look something like
|
| https://scikit-learn.org/0.23/auto_examples/model_selection/...
|
| and for my RSS reader I am happy to approach an AUC of 0.8, an
| AUC of > 0.95 for most tasks is getting into science fiction
| territory. And that's nowhere near being able to clean up hate
| speech at the rate that it should be cleared.
|
| The short of it is that if you want to get rid of a lot more
| than "5%" of the outright "hate speech" you will also get rid
| of a lot of "dislike speech" and "angry speech" and "annoyed
| speech" as well as some "innocent speech".
|
| To be really frank my filter deletes anything about "cis" and
| "trans" because it I think maybe 10% of what people say on the
| subject is outright hateful, 80% of it is emotionally negative,
| maybe 10% of the time somebody has something neutral or
| positive to say. My take is that losing a small amount of
| content I might want to see for being free of a lot of
| negativity is a bargain I am willing to make. A platform that
| imposed that kind of judgement on the community could be a
| _much_ more emotionally positive place than anything you 've
| seen but it is also going to get all sorts of criticism from
| people for doing so.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > It is almost laughable that Mastodon could do any better in
| a case like Myanmar.
|
| > First there would be the delay of the rest of the community
| understanding what was going on in an unusual language.
| Second there is the difficulty of deciding what to do and
| implementing an effective filtering policy. Third since there
| are multiple instances this can't be done in a consistent way
| across the network.
|
| This (except the last bit) is missing the point about what
| Mastodon is for.
|
| Why would "the rest of the community" would even be entitled
| to decide what to do about it ? Not that there would be a lot
| of overlap with the Burmese community anyway, so that
| wouldn't have much of an effect.
|
| We already had an example BTW, with Gab splitting out with
| Mastodon, but then in a heavily English-speaking context.
|
| What _would_ have made at least a symbolic difference, is
| that some of these Mastodons would have been operated by the
| anti-hatred groups described in part I, and they would not
| have needed to unsuccessfully beg Facebook about doing
| moderation (with 0-4 moderators from other continents).
|
| But in the end this is mostly spurious discussion : hate
| speech only effectively gets stomped out when a judge hands
| out sentences to the haters, but when the law enforcement
| that should handle them are the ones preparing genocide...
|
| (Not that Facebook is not condamnable for heating it up.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Certainly a lot of people seem to believe that many
| Mastodon instances are better moderated than commercial
| social media.
|
| Certainly some kinds of right-wing hate are suppressed but
| there is very little pushback about widespread misuse of
| the word "fascist" to describe your local police
| department, or people in women's sports who use period
| trackers to prevent ACL tears, mainstream milquetoast
| politicians, or just about anyone.
|
| On the other hand a lot of it seems like BS, there are two
| Mastodon instances that seem to be at war with Hacker News,
| I think I understand why one of them is mad at HN, I don't
| know if the second is mad out of sympathy with the first or
| they have some other grievance.
|
| Many mastodonsters were concerned that Threads would be
| poorly moderated (might allow posts about how period
| tracking prevents ACL tears in female athletes I guess) but
| Threads pretty much dropped everybody's radar.
|
| ---
|
| One angle is that a system like this should have "defense
| in depth", like you try to create a culture where hateful
| speech is not welcome, where people don't try it because
| they know they'll get disapproval, where people know
| they'll get confronted if they call Keir Starmer a fascist,
| where people know you just don't boost hateful things, etc.
|
| In that sense you might just want to cultivate a lot of
| positive and neutral stuff and encourage people seeking
| negativity to go elsewhere. I _think_ this is what
| Instagram was going for with Threads and it might be one
| reason why people should be asking "whatever happened to
| Threads?" but they don't because they've forgotten all
| about it.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| [dead]
| intended wrote:
| The term is Prevalence. I have been looking for years, and have
| essentially shifted careers to find it. I didnt even have a
| name for it until recently. There is also no way to get the
| data you are looking for. As someone described it - this is
| akin to asking how much crime happens every day.
|
| You could get an approximation - For resourced languages
| though.
|
| Meta launched Hindi classifiers in 2021 and Bengali in 2022,
| covering 0.6bn and 0.24bn people, respectively. I know how poor
| the lexicons I have seen in the wild are, and how hard it is to
| stay ahead of terminology.
|
| Meta is probably doing more to stay ahead than others. However
| the ARPU for a user in the US vs India is stark.
|
| Platforms aren't going to release the necessary data for even a
| rough approximation. Reddit was a potential data source to
| learn from, but now we have the API rules, so that is also
| closed off. Lucky us.
|
| Not to mention how supremely unprepared society is to actually
| understand or discuss the data without making it worse.
|
| Meta has more resources and frankly they regained my trust
| years ago. However, business is business. Twitter and Reddit
| have shown that in this current cycle, there are are no
| consequences for neglecting Trust and Safety, as shown by other
| companies. T&S teams have been reduced globally. T&S teams are
| being targeted and vilified.
|
| Next year, there are ~50 elections happening, including the USA
| and India. The network suits certain narratives - the more
| insular, fear driven ones. Trust and Safety teams are
| themselves being exposed.
|
| Its already looking like a perfect storm.
| erie wrote:
| Facebook has been the internet in Myanmar,' Entering the
| country in 2010, Facebook initially allowed its app to be used
| without incurring data charges, so it gained rapid popularity.
| It would come pre-loaded on phones bought at mobile shops and
| was a cultural fit.'
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Is Facebook still allowed in Myanmar?
| alxmng wrote:
| The military blocks Facebook (and Twitter), but everyone uses
| it via VPN (including members of the military). Online commerce
| is popular, and the majority of online commerce happens on
| Facebook with cash-on-delivery.
| jowea wrote:
| The previous parts do say that Facebook was not doing well even
| when it was just disorganized masses and some provocateurs, but I
| am the only one who feels it is weird that Facebook, a private
| company, is expect to "fight" state organizations? Is this
| consequence of free market capitalism really how the US should do
| things?
| rakoo wrote:
| Being a private company doesn't absolve you from
| responsibilities. If you can't function, as a company, without
| inciting a mass genocide, then maybe you should just close
| shop.
|
| "Free market" doesn't exist, never has, but I will not repeat
| myself here. Capitalism isn't inevitable, and is indeed
| incompatible with people being in their own power and not dying
| because a private company finds it profitable. I am delighted
| to see that we arrive at the same conclusion: capitalism should
| be abolished.
| logicchains wrote:
| >without inciting a mass genocide
|
| The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook was
| just one of the communication mediums they used.
|
| >capitalism should be abolished
|
| Pretty rich saying this while commenting on Myanmar. Myanmar
| did abolish capitalism, that's why they have a communist
| government, and nobody has the power to stand up to the
| government because no capitalism == no private property.
| Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people in
| the government are allowed to own property", and on top of
| that constructing a violent state apparatus to destroy anyone
| who dares to acquire property of their own.
|
| You can't abolish capitalism without also having groups of
| armed men arresting or killing anyone who tries to open a
| shop, because violently intervening is the only way to stop
| two willing parties from trading with each other. And this is
| not exaggeration, it's literally what happened in China and
| Russia after the communist revolutions.
| rakoo wrote:
| > The Myanmar government incited a mass genocide, Facebook
| was just one of the communication mediums they used.
|
| It's not about who did the genocide, it's about what was
| the role of Facebook in the genocide
|
| > Abolishing capitalism is essentially saying "only people
| in the government are allowed to own property"
|
| As you said before, abolishing capitalism means abolishing
| private property. If the government has property,
| capitalism wasn't abolished; in fact, as what happened in
| USSR and China, capitalism wasn't abolished, it was only
| enabled for a different subset of the population.
|
| > and on top of that constructing a violent state apparatus
| to destroy anyone who dares to acquire property of their
| own.
|
| Surely you know about communist and socialist ideology and
| don't imply that a state is still necessary
| jowea wrote:
| My point is not to absolve Facebook really. If they're making
| the software, publishing it to the country, designing the
| algorithm for maximum profit, profiting when a fake news
| content farm posts hate speech, and making deals to zero-rate
| the service then yes they definitively share in the blame.
|
| It's more that we are expecting an US company with a goal
| profit and controlled by a single person to be the world
| moderator. We got used to it but to me it feels weird if I
| try to stop being a fish in the water.
|
| The US government is not really definitive on whether their
| large companies and media industry are an agent of state
| power or not. Sometimes they aren't, sometimes the government
| pushes a bit (like with the Hollywood military movies),
| sometimes Congress calls Zuckerberg to complain, sometimes
| it's American society that pushes American companies into
| pursuing goals in other countries. But then Facebook is
| expected to oppose state organizations from other countries.
| Sure they have the money but is that really in their purview
| and the best way to handle things?
|
| And in this case, the local government, which in an ideal
| world would be the proper "moderator" for when the national
| debate has gone beyond acceptable bounds is actually an
| hostile agent. So the foreign private organization is
| supposed to deal with that.
|
| In my opinion a situation where a profit-maximizing company
| is in this type of situation where profit and basic human
| rights are in conflict things already have gone wrong. I
| don't know how but avoiding a genocide shouldn't depend on
| some distant corporate officer paying attention to a country
| responsible for a tiny fraction of revenue and deciding to
| lower the company's profits!
|
| And one of the root problems IMHO is that like a few things
| in the tech world, this series makes obvious the issues with
| Myanmar like a lot of other Third World countries using tech
| developed in and for the West. So Facebook then throws its
| platform over the wall for some extra profit above what it
| gets in the First World, grabs nearly the entire market since
| it has lots of already invested capital in software and
| infrastructure and negotiating power for zero-rating, all
| without having to expend barely any money doing things like
| hiring moderators or adapting to local conditions.
|
| Sorry for rambling.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This series is an interesting view into Meta's internal policies
| - but historically it lacks a great of context and doesn't
| explain the roots of the conflict that led to the mass exodus of
| Rohingya people from Myanmar - in fact the author is almost
| entirely silent on a key issue that exacerbated the situation:
| Saudi-Pakistani efforts to run a regime change operation based in
| the Rohingya region. See Reuters, 2016:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmars...
|
| > ""Though not confirmed, there are indications he went to
| Pakistan and possibly elsewhere, and that he received practical
| training in modern guerrilla warfare," the group said. It noted
| that Ata Ullah was one of 20 Rohingya from Saudi Arabia leading
| the group's operations in Rakhine State. Separately, a committee
| of 20 senior Rohingya emigres oversees the group, which has
| headquarters in Mecca, the ICG said."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataullah_abu_Ammar_Jununi
|
| That certainly doesn't justify the response of the Myanmar
| government, but it helps explain it to some degree - imagine the
| US political response if, say, US border facilities were attacked
| by an Iran-based group that killed a dozen US border guards.
|
| Entirely neglecting this background is just bad journalism, and
| also distorts the role of Meta. It's highly unlikely, given this
| information, that a rigorous censorship strategy on Meta would
| have changed the outcome much if at all. A more rational
| conclusion is that the Myanmar government viewed the Rohingya
| people as a potential base for Saudi/Pakistani-backed terror
| groups to launch attacks within Myanmar, and that was the root
| cause of the expulsion, and that social media-based propaganda
| efforts were not that important in understanding what happened.
|
| I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very easy
| to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless hatred of
| others based on their ethnic/religious/racial background is
| simply the product of ignorance and immaturity.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| They _did_ mention in the previous parts about ARSA killing
| border guards and executing 99 civilians (?)
| g-b-r wrote:
| > I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship
|
| At issue here is the PROMOTION of misinformation, lies and
| genocidal speech (in users' feeds), not the fact that they
| haven't deleted it.
| p_j_w wrote:
| > I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very
| easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless
| hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial
| background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity.
|
| Demonstrating that fact is a really poor substitute for taking
| some kind of action against an ongoing genocide.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Practically, the best way to have avoided the problem might
| have been to encourage Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to NOT
| engage in the export of radical Wahhabist ideology and the
| funding of regime change operations in other states.
|
| Kind of like the best way to have avoided the war in Ukraine
| would have been for the USA to NOT have engaged in a regime
| change op in 2014, and the best way to avoid the current
| Libyan disaster would have been for NATO to have NOT engaged
| in a regime change operation in 2011, and so on.
| catlover76 wrote:
| > I'm also in favor of free speech over censorship - it's very
| easy to demonstrate in an open conversation that mindless
| hatred of others based on their ethnic/religious/racial
| background is simply the product of ignorance and immaturity.
|
| Clearly it's not; this myth needs to stop being pushed.
| Everything we have observed from the internet age is that such
| hatred metastasizes even easier because of the internet and
| social media, and that almost all discourse is worse.
| alxmng wrote:
| Agreed. Myanmar has been at civil war since WWII. The Tatmadaw
| viewed Arakan muslims as enemies for decades before Facebook.
| In the 1980s they had policies against them. And that's just
| _one_ conflict in Myanmar. The Tatmadaw has been killing Shan,
| Karen, and other ethnic groups for 70 years. The Karen conflict
| is one of the longest running conflicts in the world. They 're
| bombing Karen and Sagaing villages right now. Facebook is
| inconsequential to Myanmar's bloody politics.
|
| It's true there are problems with Facebook. But without
| Facebook the Tatmadaw would still have laws against Rohingya,
| still have a policy of driving them out, still would engage in
| fighting ARSA, still would fund and promote groups like Ma Ba
| Tha, etc.
| blix wrote:
| The conflict in Myanmar isn't a civil war any more than the
| conflict of the USA between settlers and natives was a civil
| war.
|
| The Myanmar (Bamar), Karen, Shan, etc populations were all
| there before the British drew the borders of 'Burma.' The
| conflict goes back way farther than WWII. The main difference
| now is that the Myanmar are winning.
| alxmng wrote:
| The conflicts exist along ethnic lines, but all major armed
| ethnic groups had formed a government together at end of
| WWII, and even today many of the groups openly support a
| federal union.
|
| Settlers and natives has nothing to do with it. All the
| major armed ethnic peoples existed in Myanmar since before
| WWII. The "settlers" were the British and they left.
| blix wrote:
| > formed a government together at end of WWII
|
| I am not convinced this ever happened in any meaningful
| sense. As you note, it turned into armed conflict almost
| immediately. This was a British-induced transient state
| that was unable to sustain itself in the region.
|
| > The "settlers" were the British and they left.
|
| The Myanmar state/people are also colonizers/conquerors.
| You don't need to come across an ocean to see territory
| that you dont control and decide to try to take control
| by force. Facebook and ethno-nationalism are simply new
| tools in a long-running conflict.
| Aunche wrote:
| I get a sense that people like the author care less about the
| Rohingya genocide as much as they enjoy the ammunition against
| Facebook. I'm sure you could cherry pick examples of Rohingya
| escaping persecution because Facebook offered better
| communication. Nobody is give Facebook credit for doing good
| and rightfully so, but why should they get the full blame for
| escalating hate speech?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| >mindless hatred of others
|
| The whole reason Facebook is a useful tool for hate groups is
| because it allows them to cultivate a fake justification for
| hate that goes beyond "mindless". Inventing crimes, doctoring
| photos, promoting false narratives and conspiracy theories,
| etc. It radicalizes moderate people by making it seem like the
| out group is an existential threat to the in group. We don't
| hate them because of their skin color or religion, we hate them
| because they're trying to kill us first.
|
| Open dialogue can't fix this because it's much harder to
| disprove bullshit than to generate it.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The discussion about how Meta purportedly twisted the content
| moderation discussions around 2020 was a revelation for me. This
| quote from Meta captures the alleged spin well:
|
| > We proactively detect 99 percent of the hate speech removed
| from Facebook in Myanmar
|
| If the accusation is correct, they are _not_ saying that they
| capture 99% of _all_ Myanmar hate speech on Facebook. I remember
| that the big news agencies reported it that way. Meta is actually
| saying "of the 5% that we do catch, 99% was caught
| automatically." The key phrasing is "99% of the hate speech
| removed".
| [deleted]
| billjings wrote:
| Oh, wow.
|
| In other words, this number actually means, "We do almost no
| non-automated detection of hate speech."
|
| Smart spin, huh...
| sdwr wrote:
| That's gross!
| ipaddr wrote:
| The author is playing word games. Author states facebooks has
| good estimates for amount of hate content. Then say 99% (of
| terrorist material) of an unknown amount.
|
| Do they have good estimates or is this an unknown amount?
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The article cites Frances Haugen's whistleblower disclosures:
|
| > ...we're deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech
| posted to Facebook. This is actually an optimistic estimate--
| previous (and more rigorous) iterations of this estimation
| exercise have put it closer to 3%, and on V&I [violence and
| incitement] we're deleting somewhere around 0.6%...we miss
| 95% of violating hate speech.
|
| https://facebookpapers.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/11/Hate-s...
| ipaddr wrote:
| Is that unknown? It's an estimate the author believes here
| and forgets below
| 3np wrote:
| Part I HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709284
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| And Part II https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37728849
| arczyx wrote:
| So Facebook is presented with a trolley problem that have people
| lives on one track and more profit on the other track, and chose
| the latter, just as what we can expect from big corporations
| nowadays.
|
| Not an unexpected decision overall, but it did surprise me how
| low Facebook can stoop. Like, they didn't even bother to fix
| their stuff in Myanmar after all these years with Myanmar being
| the poster child of their hate speech problem!
|
| > In 2022, Global Witness came back for one more look at Meta's
| operations in Myanmar, this time with eight examples of real hate
| speech aimed at the Rohingya--actual posts from the period of the
| genocide, all taken from the UN Human Rights Council findings
| I've been linking to so frequently in this series. They submitted
| these real-life examples of hate speech to Meta as Burmese-
| language Facebook advertisements.
|
| > Meta accepted all eight ads.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why "nowadays" ? In which century did big corporations behave
| responsibly ?
|
| Of course Facebook didn't fix anything in Myanmar - the new
| junta government is both the one running the troll farms and
| responsible for the previous genocide !
| cm2012 wrote:
| I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads its
| getting from Myanmar per year. This is more an issue of a giant
| corporation not noticing that some users in a foreign country
| speaking in a foreign language were doing horrible things with
| their platform. At worst its negligence. If it wasn't for the
| Facebook association most HN users would not even know Myanmar
| was in a civil war at all.
|
| (Keep in mind after this, Facebook hired 20,000+ content
| moderators at great expense who they still employ to monitor
| for stuff like this).
| arczyx wrote:
| > At worst its negligence
|
| According to the article, Facebook did make the deliberate
| decision not to dedicate resources to Myanmar and other non-
| western countries, so I don't think it's negligence. "Greed"
| is more appropriate.
|
| > Guy Rosen, Facebook's VP of Integrity, told Sophie Zhang
| that the only coordinated fake networks Facebook would take
| down were the ones that affected the US, Western Europe, and
| "foreign adversaries."
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Purposely ignoring a problem is negligence.
| cm2012 wrote:
| That's frankly sensible? There are three hundred+ countries
| on earth, to monitor all of their "fake networks" would
| take an organization like the CIAs. It's like saying its
| greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of all
| their workers. its not reasonable.
| rakoo wrote:
| > its greed that Apple doesn't solve the family issues of
| all their workers. its not reasonable.
|
| Of course it's greed, and of course it's reasonable.
| Apple is directly responsible for the work conditions of
| its workers and the contractors they use, absolutely. If
| they can't be responsible then they can close shop. There
| is no obligation for them to have a business.
| taway1237 wrote:
| Maybe they should consider not operating in countries
| where they unmonitored presence may lead to genocide?
|
| There's no obligation to operate everywhere. Instead, as
| discussed in previous parts, they invested heavily to get
| a monopoly in third world countries.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Then they shouldn't operate there if they can't do so
| without their users being harmed as a result
| paulddraper wrote:
| Like, block IP addresses?
| amerkhalid wrote:
| Prevent creating accounts in countries they cannot
| operate responsibly. Disallow comments in languages they
| cannot moderate.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| >Disallow comments in languages they cannot moderate.
|
| I promise you if they tried that people would complain
| even harder.
| paulddraper wrote:
| HN is never happy
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Seems like a good start
| arczyx wrote:
| I really don't want to ask this since it run contrary to
| HN rules, but did you really read the article?
|
| No one expect Facebook to remove _all_ misinformation
| /hate speech/etc. That is unreasonable. But they have
| literally 1 data scientist to monitor the whole non-
| western world.
|
| In a year where their annual profit is $23.9bn.
|
| Assuming 1 data scientist is paid $500k/year, surely it
| is sensible to dedicate $20mn, _less than 0.1% of their
| annual profit_ , to hire 40 more such data scientist and
| literally increase their effectiveness on this topic by
| 4000%? At the very least, this is what I expect from a
| company that actually have a speck of moral.
|
| > A strategic response manager told me that the world
| outside the US/Europe was basically like the wild west
| with me as the part-time dictator in my spare time. He
| considered that to be a positive development because to
| his knowledge it wasn't covered by anyone before he
| learned of the work I was doing.
| fsociety wrote:
| When you write "they have literally 1 data scientist to
| monitor the whole non-western world", I assume you mean
| Sophie Zhang. I agree with a lot of what she said, and I
| mean a lot, but you have a misconception.
|
| The integrity org, back when I was there, had thousands
| of folks and was aggressively hiring. They were not a
| lone island and were also supported by other orgs like
| data infra, FAIR, security, privacy, product teams and
| more.
|
| Site integrity, Sophie's team, was a small piece of the
| work done there. And they, like any team, relied heavily
| on other teams. You have all this unbelievable tooling
| internally, and internal teams are incentivized to get
| you to use it.
|
| These issues were not from want of trying. The reality is
| that problems like this at scale are incredibly
| difficult. In my opinion, Frances trivialized a lot of
| this in her whistleblowing, but it makes a good news
| story so what can you do.
|
| It pains me when people trivialize it as "just do the
| machine learnings to fix it all" or "if these tech
| companies actually gave a damn this wouldn't be an
| issue". It's an incredibly hard problem, and much like
| security it will never be "solved".
|
| That doesn't excuse when technology has a bad effect on
| the world. We need to be better, and for the most part as
| a society we are trying hard as hell. It's also why the
| work is interesting and impactful. More should get into
| it.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| The series of articles makes it very clear that there are
| simple, non-high tech things Facebook could have done to
| mitigate the problem.
|
| Insisting that it's hard and requires advanced ML is
| complete BS. Self delusion by FB'ers to give themselves
| and excuse for their complicity.
| bostik wrote:
| I'll provide a slightly different argument.
|
| I talked to FB people (recruiters, managers) in the site
| integrity team back in 2018. Admittedly I had some
| reservations up front, but during the on-site day I made
| up my mind to never even consider FB as a potential
| employer again. During a chat session between interviews,
| I asked about the prospect of doing proactive education -
| essentially, detecting users who had been caught in the
| influence operations and then surfacing them a note that
| they had been targeted by such activities, so that they
| could _themselves_ make educated decisions.
|
| The senior manager I was talking with at the time was
| visibly taken aback by the very idea. "We don't do that!"
|
| From that experience I drew the inference that FB are
| fundamentally, as an organisation, incapable of doing the
| right thing. I suspect it's less about the cost, and more
| about the prospect of openly accepting accountability for
| what their platform is really used for.
| afavour wrote:
| If you can't operate responsibly in 300+ markets then
| don't operate in 300+ markets? Seems sensible to me.
|
| If an airline doesn't have enough pilots to service 20
| routes they reduce their routes, not let passengers fly
| the plane.
| nradov wrote:
| What does operating responsibly mean? Everyone seems to
| have a different definition of that.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I wouldn't think the CIA would be capable of doing such a
| thing and if it tried it would devolve into scandal one
| way or another.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| This comment makes sense after reading his history.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Yes, a history of trying to get to the truth of matters
| even if it's not popular in the zeitgeist.
|
| Look at fsociety's comment in this same thread to see
| just how much misinformation is out there (which he
| helpfully corrects)
|
| It just so happens a lot of misinformation is anti-
| corporate since many people want to believe every bad
| thing they hear about them. So I end up being one of the
| few commenters who say, actually, the big company did try
| here.
|
| This is important because if every big company is
| supposed to be equally bad, there's no reputational
| penalty for the actually bad ones.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > Facebook hired 20,000+ content moderators at great expense
| who they still employ to monitor for stuff like this
|
| Part II of this series addresses this stat. During the peak
| genocidal years it seems there were only a handful of mods
| assigned to Myanmar, and none of them lived in Myanmar. To
| this day it sounds like there still may not be more than a
| hundred people moderating Myanmar content. Which is inline
| with the 20K number: 195 countries * 100 moderators per
| country = 19.5K mods total
|
| I guess my main idea here is that when I look at the back-of-
| envelope numbers it's easy to see how even 100 moderators
| would have trouble keeping up with the content that millions
| of people produce. So you really do need those automated
| moderation tools to be effective.
|
| Can someone please continue the thought experiment by
| estimating how much content each mod can review in a day,
| then extrapolating up to a week or month, and comparing to an
| estimate of how much content was actually posted on Facebook
| in the similar timeframe? I believe Part I or II provides an
| estimate like that.
| duped wrote:
| > I promise you Meta doesn't give a shit about the $8 in ads
| its getting from Myanmar per year.
|
| They did certainly care about the growth of daily active
| users even if it meant they expanded to markets where they
| couldn't responsibly moderate their platform.
| blululu wrote:
| User growth and profits are not the same thing.
|
| A company as big as Facebook is going to have different
| groups with different objectives that often do not see eye
| to eye or even know about each other. A company as
| profitable as Facebook is going to have projects that are
| motivated by things other than profits.
|
| There is most likely a team at Facebook whose goal it is to
| get as many users as possible in developing markets. These
| markets do not generate profits from online ads. Facebook
| will never disclose its cost per user but in general online
| ads only make money from affluent users. I have heard that
| even mid income countries like Mexico or Romania are not
| profitable for ads. A place where people make an average of
| $3 a day is wildly unprofitable for Facebook and even the
| most optimistic development projections will not make them
| profitable for several decades. The OP is spot on that the
| amount of money that Facebook will ever receive from
| Myanmar is negligible.
|
| Based on conversations with people at Facebook I generally
| get the sense that people there (especially at the top)
| have a strong sense of mission and a belief that their
| product makes the world a better place (I disagree with
| this but that doesn't change the fact). I would guess that
| these the project tasked with increasing users in
| developing countries is viewed more as philanthropy than
| business.
| czhu12 wrote:
| People have been quite good at committing genocide well before
| Facebook came around. I suspect even if Facebook didn't exist,
| the situation in Myanmar would not be materially improved.
| g-b-r wrote:
| We need a Nuremberg trial for Facebook (without the death
| sentences, which I don't support for anyone)
| [deleted]
| gizmo385 wrote:
| What exactly is the target of the comparison here? Facebooks
| existence? Its behavior? And whatever that thing is, to be
| clear, you are comparing it to the crimes against humanity
| committed by the nazis during world war 2? Regardless of
| whether you like or dislike Facebook, that comparison seems
| patently absurd.
| g-b-r wrote:
| It for example faciliated a genocide, the rise or
| confirmation of authoritarian and bloody regimes, _and kept
| consciously doing it_ if you read the article.
|
| The reference to Nuremberg was more for an example of an
| international trial than for the nazis, although faciliting a
| smaller scale genocide does somehow seem to have a
| relationship with the nazis...
|
| Given the havoc they willingly caused to nations worldwide,
| an international trial for Zuckerberg and the other
| responsibles does not seem so inconceivable to me...
|
| And that's not considering a lot of other probably less
| important things they did
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| We need to fix our antitrust :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457766
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