Google bans plug-in that picks out Jews
bbc.com
bbc.com
I think I inadvertently broke the same rules alluded to in the article, i.e. I have a small personal project where I mapped the buildings from my Eastern European city which used to be owned by Jewish people before they had been nationalized by the newly-arrived communists in 1948. I use Google Maps for displaying said buildings, and in order to "identify" a name as being Jewish I compared the names of the owners from the nationalization law to the entries from yadvashem.org (given enough matches for a certain name it meant that said person was Jewish).
Now, I didn't do this because I hate Jews, on the contrary, I did it because I am saddened by the loss of the Jewish cultural element from my city (they used to comprise around 10-12% of the city population before WW2, most of them emigrated to Israel by the late 1960s), and wanted to sort of make their presence felt again.
I also wanted to, at some point, map on Google Maps the Jewish cemeteries from my part of the country, which are almost all of them being forgotten and not taken care of (seeing as a former Jewish presence of around ~700,000 in the 1930s now only numbers ~3,000). But this article makes me think twice. What if someone thinks I would do that only for some Nazi-group to have a better target?
"Is a member of a nazi-esque group" is not exclusive from "is tech literate enough to write browser add-ons".
If you let others control your actions, even indirectly, you show them that they have power and control over you. Many tools that are beneficial are also "double-edged" and could be used for nefarious purposes. In most cases, they're better off existing than not.
Learning Jewish names and characteristics was quite useful in being able to better adapt myself socially, especially when it came to food, holidays, etc. An extension like this would have no doubt been helpful.
It's weird to me that noting which names are likely jewish is taboo =/ I never thought of it as anti-semetic or racist at the time.
The line is harder to draw when you're talking about automated tools, where something that automatically identifies Jews could be used in either way, and now you have to decide whether a blanket ban is worth it to stamp out the bad usages.
If anything we should be talking about the merits for and against this PR move, Software Freedom, PR freedom, etc.
As a PR move, some people will like it, some wont. I personally don't like this PR move because I relatively care more about software freedom, and I think it's undesirable to censor apps based on the majority use case of it, instead of what the app actually does.
I don't disagree with you about software freedom, but this plugin sounds like it was specifically intended to direct hate speech. Another commenter in the tree included a link to a different posting about how the ((())) is used as a marker to target people online. This app injects the ((()))'s.
If the plugin had used a less loaded indicator, I might see this situation differently. However, since the plugin is using an indicator specifically intended to mark people for abuse online, I have no doubt about its intentions.
Edit: Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826647
I understand your point. You care more about Google discouraging negative racial speech (I don't like the phrase hate speech as its used too subjectively) than you do software freedom. And from that perspective google made the right PR move.
But, as someone that cares more about software freedom, freedom of speech, etc, I think it's a bad PR move.
In the end, Google will do whatever it think is best in its opinion.
> I understand your point. You care more about Google discouraging negative racial speech (I don't like the phrase hate speech as its used too subjectively) than you do software freedom. And from that perspective google made the right PR move.
That's not quite my point.
In most situations where this is an issue, it's a judgement call on balancing freedom with ethical/moral concerns. I believe in neither extreme because they both represent systems that are broken in very obvious ways. Title IX and the various Civil Rights Acts are pretty good examples where freedom of speech (and some other freedoms) are explicitly limited for worthwhile reasons.
In this situation, even in its most charitable interpretation, it's probably a tool for directing unambiguously negative racial speech that's tied to a social agenda that is unhealthy for our society's cohesion.
My point is that in this case, the balance of considerations puts this app clearly on the "unambiguously bad" part of this spectrum, and it's quite possible to value software freedom or freedom of speech and still think that Google made the right PR move.
After all, if you just pick up your gun tomorrow and shoot your neighbor you'll be guilty of murder. But put on a uniform and shoot someone because your boss tells you to and you're probably a hero. More prosaically, accidentally killing someone is punished less severely than deliberately doing so.
FWIW I am glad google tok this action, but at the same time I am troubled by it, and by my support for it. They are a private company and are welcome to do what they would like, however they are also a kind of public utility, and by taking this step encourage themselves to be pressured by various governments to censor other results. And does this implicitly waive their CDA section 230 immunity in the USA?
It's weird to me that people ever made a note of it at all. But that's my POV having grown up in a...less than enlightened area of the U. S. IOW, if anyone ever made a note about the origins of a particular name, it was usually in the context of, "Levi SomethingStein? Sounds like a Jew name!" and not meant as a compliment. I always thought it was silly, but your post gives me a new perspective on a possible good reason to do this.
But given how I always thought it was silly (or rather where I grew up, bigoted and mean-spirited), I sometimes missed the obvious. A co-worker once took the day off for $JEWISH_HOLIDAY. I commented, "oh, didn't know John was Jewish." "Dude, his last name is GOLDHAMMER." Oh. Duh. Seems kind of obvious now.
It seems likely that the bigots will just find other ways to share names of people to harass.
Not at all. It's their software and their app store.
As an aside, what a cringe:
> The extension was developed by a far-right group called alt-right.
Mintruth has to be a lot more competent with subtlety than that! I doubt this particular altar boy will go very far in our nouveau church.
therightstuff.biz is just a nasty site.
Do you have any other suggestions other than "firms need to consider potential exploitation..."? Have you seen Twitter? There will always be bad actors.
Do you want imperfect freedom or an imperfect walled-garden?
Twitter (in contrast with say, Instagram or Facebook) seem actually like the perfect textbook case for this.
The level of abuse seen on FB and Insta vs. Twitter is night and day. I think this is in fact a great argument for "firms need to consider potential exploitation..." - we know that FB spent a lot of time curbing abusive behavior, and more importantly designing the basic mechanisms of the service to discourage bad behavior.
Twitter on the other hand has always half-assed abuse prevention, and refused to adopt even small measures that discourage abusive behavior.
The result is stark. To go back to OP's thought:
> "Social technology firms need to consider the potential exploitation of their technology by bad actors"
Facebook heeded this advice, Twitter did not. Facebook suffers dramatically less abuse and bad actors, and the impact of each bad actor is similarly lessened.
Design matters, technology matters, designing systems defensively to account for bad actors is important, and thinking about it does make things better.
And if we need a business case to justify doing the right thing, FB's numbers vs. Twitter is pretty clear vindication...
On Facebook you're interacting mostly with people you know, at least tangentially and who are identifiable as individuals to you.
On Twitter, you're interacting with the public at large. You're welcoming comments from anyone and in large part the abuse comes from arguments arising from discussions of controversial topics which are publicly discussed and are far from black or white. This breeds anger among those who do view them as black and white issues and anger breeds abuse.
These tools inherently attract a different crowd. In terms of both use and abuse.
> "On Facebook you're interacting mostly with people you know, at least tangentially and who are identifiable as individuals to you."
But also importantly, Facebook gives users control over who is allowed to see your posts, message you, or reply to your posts. They started with a default-public model and have slowly contracted this to favor those you have explicitly friended over rando strangers.
This is a conscious decision on their part from their learnings about abuse - it isn't accidental.
> "You're welcoming comments from anyone and in large part the abuse comes from arguments arising from discussions of controversial topics"
It does, and many of Twitter's mechanisms make this phenomenon worse, at no benefit to users. Someone says something controversial, and that person's followers get into an argument with them about it. And then someone retweets it and yanks in a completely different group of people, none of whom know the original poster, or in fact know anyone (even obliquely) involved in the conversation.
And then someone else retweets it into another group which is now even further removed from the original conversation. At each level empathy decreases as outrage increases, and at no point was there ever a helpful discourse for anyone.
Fast forward an hour or two and somebody is calling a SWAT team to somebody else's house.
Twitter is fundamentally structured in a way that allows a very high branching factor to content dissemination. This was a great way to gain traction early on, but at this point IMO is more a liability than a strength.
Twitter's also consistently refused to assign explicit ownership of spaces. On Facebook if I behave abusively in one of your posts, you are free to delete my post. I can also control who sees my posts and who is allowed to reply to them.
No such control exists on Twitter, where anyone can butt into any conversation at will, and none of the original participants in the conversation can do anything about it - because despite being the original participants no concept of content ownership exists.
> "These tools inherently attract a different crowd. In terms of both use and abuse."
That's exactly my point. We tend to think of abuse mitigation as a purely reactive topic - someone is abusive, another person hits the "report" button, some system kicks in, posts get deleted, people get banned, etc etc.
But that's a losing battle. You can't outpace reactive abuse patrol/flagging if the structure of your tools, like you said, inherently attracts a different crowd. The fundamental designs of our social networks (or really, all technology) needs to account for bad actors. Abuse prevention cannot successfully be implemented as a layer on top of something else.
That said, I think it's also an error state that these services attract a "different crowd". Human behavior is incredibly circumstance based - people will behave as the system encourages or discourages. I'm willing to bet that nearly everyone on Twitter is also on Facebook, but they act very differently on the two services. It's too simplistic to model abusive bad actors as inherently prone to abuse.
I also think it serves a very different purpose.
You're seeing them as something that could be the same in order to lower abuse, but I don't think that's true. Some of the things you say are bad about Twitter are actually things which make it a great public discussion tool.
They're different tools - they cater to different parts of the market. If you want to have a public discussion about something, because of Twitter's decisions here, you take it to Twitter, not Facebook.
All of these decisions are things that make Facebook a better tool for interacting with people who you know and Twitter a better tool for interacting with people that you don't.
They're completely different markets and both serve a purpose.
> That said, I think it's also an error state that these services attract a "different crowd". Human behavior is incredibly circumstance based - people will behave as the system encourages or discourages. I'm willing to bet that nearly everyone on Twitter is also on Facebook, but they act very differently on the two services. It's too simplistic to model abusive bad actors as inherently prone to abuse.
This is somewhat true, but I don't think that without Twitter there would be no popular public discussion-oriented service. I think it's a niche that needs to be filled. Despite the fact that that niche sometimes breeds hostility.
I feel fairly confident saying that Twitter wouldn't exist anymore if they tried to clone Facebook's protected and personal-style rather than paving their own more public style. Things like filtering who can see your messages and who can enter a discussion are just not things people want in a service which is oriented towards the public. You'll take those things to Facebook instead and they know that.
The abuse and hostility risk is simply an inherent part of being a very public-oriented service, the odds of an actual problem arising for any individual user are infinitesimally small. It's something people are willing to risk and get involved in sometimes. There may be some minor tweaks, but nothing that would inherently changed the way the platform is used as you're suggesting would allow them to continue their existence or to effectively serve the niche they're in currently.
If anything, we should worry that tech giants' weaknesses are being abused by bad state actors in ways that have actual consequences, like targeting dissidents, anti-regime journalists, ...
I think you're overestimating the strength of these groups -- they are roundly mocked in social media.