Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Why can't I just stop watching something I find offensive, at most flagging it for later review (to determine if it is actively dangerous in some way) rather than living in a world where some stupidly biased "intelligence" (whether human or artificial) gets to determine what is "offensive"? Facebook already is a massive filter bubble, where my own biases bias who I allow as friends: isn't that enough to ensure that I effectively only see content I find reasonable?

I mean, really: I do not find nudity offensive, and nor do most of the people I know (I would say "any", but maybe someone is just keeping quiet). I definitely never found breast feeding offensive, and would even say I find the notion that Facebook had previously been removing such content and calling it offensive itself extremely offensive (and it isn't clear to me that they have truly stopped, though their official policy is now to accept it).

Are they really going to take the time to correctly retrain all their algorithms to deal with policy shifts? Is it even correct to try to do this "live" given that context later in the video might change peoples' ideas about what the content was showing, where what looked like exhibitionism turns out to be a political protest? The difference between a live "unedited" news broadcast (as is being increasingly done: the local TV station and newspaper where I live have been using Facebook live streaming) and an opinion segment or narrative is also subtle: will it flag and block live footage of a riot as "violence"? What happens when the algorithm says "President Trump's State of the Union is hate speech"? Will they be proudly letting it stop the stream?

Gah.

It's just the ever expanding march toward bubbles and safe spaces. It's funny we're here after decades of US prudishness on TV and media in general.

The internet seemed to open things up a bit, but now we have a new wave of outrage and moralism that seems to think they can tell everyone else what to think and feel, and what information they're allowed to see.

Kind of ironic that the internet is being used as a tool for censorship now, given what it used to be.

>Kind of ironic that the internet is being used as a tool for censorship now, given what it used to be.

Facebook != The Internet

The internet has always been about safe spaces. One of the great things I loved about usenet in the 90s was that different groups offered safe spaces where I could be myself among like-minded people.

Because sites like Facebook and Twitter make money on dividing people and highlighting differences between groups.

And so freedom of expression slowly gets chopped away piece by piece with “the best intentions”. If freedom of expression weren't “offensive”, at least to some people, it wouldn't need to be protected in the first place. And, whoever decides what can or can't be said at FB doesn't make that decision based on a democratic process.

> freedom of expression slowly gets chopped away piece by piece

Only if you have genuine content and play by the rules. AI can be gamed. Removing humans is leaving the door wide open for all sorts of fake content.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In a certain sense, our freedom of expression is intrinsically chopped away by reliance on private platforms with no democratic control and no authentication of content.

>Why can't I just stop watching something I find offensive...

Because it's not your decision to make. It's up to Facebook to decide what you can or can not watch.

Because facebook has a monopoly on social news, with a network effect tightly locked in. You can wait forever for a competitor to balance them , or break them.

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