Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content moderation team well, or it tends to be an afterthought. In reality, this can be the hardest and most important job at a company. PTSD is a real problem with these teams, and pay is often sub-par. And when they make mistakes (or when they don't but people still get mad), they tend to get the bulk of the criticism from it. And then at the end, they usually aren't allowed to talk publicly about any of the work they do.
Please take your content moderation department seriously. If you have one, read through the crap Facebook's team has to deal with on a daily basis, and then go over and hug them.
Is it? I always admired the much-scoffed YouTube as the free-est place to talk on the internet. Where a vegan gay liberal from NY can discuss on the same video with a neo-con Mongolian and a 15-year old hipster from Sweden, an Israeli Jew, an Arab, and a black South African truck driver, and even agree and share experiences, and at worse you just get a few insults thrown and that's it.
I can only imagine how much worse it is for the team over at Youtube. The first thing I would do as CEO over there is hug them, give them a raise, double their vacation time, and make sure they have very good access to mental health services in case they need it. I'm not saying they're treated poorly right now, but again, it would be one of the first things I looked at.
/r/AskReddit is one of the best places to have such free and open conversations and the best thing is that you get to set the topic for the conversation instead of some arbitrary video remotely related to what you want to talk about.
That's a good point (allowing for deeper discussion), but in YouTube I also like how the image/video transcends borders and politics etc in a way that targeted discussion doesn't.
(You can be anything, black, KKK, hipster barrista, 40yo soccer mon, Jew, Arab, donald-fan, etc, but still like/dislike the same cat clip, or old bluegrass song, or belly dancing or whatever).
Freedom of speech is great, and important. That doesn't mean that there's any value in just anybody exploring the boundaries of it.
This says more about your sampling bias than youtube itself.
And the fact you are posting this says more about the magnitude of your political bias (its exact direction being yet tbd) than anything you read. I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.
And both of the above say more about your willingness to characterize the parent than about the issue under discussion.
>I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.
Doesn't seem to matter, as long as they don't also ACT on what they believe/say. Which is the case for most people (both positive, e.g. they are racist but they wont act on it, and negative, e.g. they say their are this or that good thing, but they're all talk about it).
A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken.
I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.
I don't think it was ever meant to make money. Lots of great (for various aspects of great) things exist for non-monetary reasons.
It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.
I don't hang out on chans but sometimes end up reading them for various reasons.
I think the constant noise and random insults actually are moderation: they keep away people prone to butthurt, who due to their stubbornness and obnoxity are absolutely the worst fun killers and threat to any discussion. Normally people call each other retards as a matter of course and don't give much fuck, but if you try to argue emotionally then you are flamed to the death.
To me it was quite eye opening to read a bit of Encyclopedia Dramatica once. Many times I saw it throw shit all over some people or idea just to click on the "see also: some ostensibly opposite idea" link at the bottom and see them throw shit all over that one too. That's a very simple and elegant solution to tribalism if you ask me, HN totally could take inspiration from them because the mods keep complaining about tribalism here :)
Communities with better moderation are apparently more popular.
Also there are many active topical boards like /an/ /cgl/ /fit/ /u/ you're not reading!
People really do hang out on 4chan, though it's lost some share recently to 8chan, but 4chan is certainly a very large forum, the 200k+ current users, as displayed on their homepage too, confirms this.
For a place where you don't have to worry about drive-by downvoters, for all its faults, 4chan is excellent for getting your opinion across.
I don't know how accurate this is, but to put some numbers on it, Reddit seems to be #9 and Twitter #11 according to Alexa [1] and 4chan is rated much lower [2].
Although, Hacker News ranks higher than I expected [3], which seems suspicious. Perhaps there's a better way to measure it?
[1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com [3] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.
I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bittorrent technology, too.
To reply to astrange (I am unable to reply using the usual method because the HN mods don't like it when I post quickly, so they've stopped me from doing that, ironically in this discussion about moderation):
I wasn't trying to say that 8chan is unmoderated, I recognize that it is moderated, because of the "only legal content" rule, rather I was trying to say that an unmoderated imageboard could exist in theory, but an imageboard which insists on only legal content is of course moderated.
Are the users haemorrhaged from that to the detriment, or the benefit of the site?
Others boards such as /mlp/ however do not show such growth into other boards, perhaps because the rule against ponies is stronger than the rule against racism.
Have you seen Facebook?
That's not what it's optimizing for. Profit and eyeballs. Don't delude yourself. Toxic? Poison? Sure thing, as long as they can sell your attention span, Facebook don't care.
Honestly. You know what it's doing. Doing to everybody.
In as far as this team is building or sustaining a community, it's a tiny sandcastle on a beach facing the automated tidal wave of corporate exploitation of our dopamine/addiction response.
Sustaining a community of junkies is very, very hard. It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "freedom to do whatever to your body" vs "personal health". There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a crack house that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there.
In my experience working at crack houses, many of them don't treat their bouncers well, or it tends to be an afterthought. In reality, this can be the hardest and most important job. PTSD is a real problem with these teams, and pay is often sub-par. And when they make mistakes (or when they don't but people still get mad), they tend to get the bulk of the criticism from it. And then at the end, they usually aren't allowed to talk publicly about any of the work they do.
(the analogy holds about as far as until you try to hug them--which is when they'll punch your lights out. but they do mean well, or something)
Yeah, that's not even close. They might get stressed, but it's not like seeing your best friend(s) getting blown to pieces every time you close your eyes.
Let's imagine that there is no moderation. What will happen ? OK, some people will have argument, there will be insult, blood, etc. And, well, depending on a tipping point, we may realize that oooooops, letting people talk in the open is not so good. FB would be blamed and hen disappear. So be it. Now, another thing to do is : prosecute those who say unacceptable things. With prosecution, you have the justice system that will handle the case. That'll be slower but there will be discussions and, hopefully better laws.
FaceBook is becoming the Judge Dredd of free speech. It decides what's criminal and what's not and it applies his own power to handle the case directly.
This also happens in sports. Someone says something in an interview, in a social network post, in a private conversation which gets published... and what happens? Depending on offense the team may, ignore, fine, suspend or fire the person in question, outside the legal framework. That is, someone may say something insensitive or can be accused (not yet proven) to have done something unbecoming... teams often feel pressure to act extrajudicially. It's just how it is where money and the public sphere of opinion intersect.
Moderators do refer the most serious cases to the police. But there's a lot of crap that falls short of that, so milder penalties work better.
You actually understood me very well. That's my secret point. I don't see why FB must do better than police. If someone insults me, then, well, I fight back, go to the police, prosecute, etc. That works well because there is the work of justice.
By displacing the problem out of FB into the realm of justice, I want to make two points :
1/ The social norm of what is acceptable or not acceptable speech is governed by the people, not by a single entity.
2/ If there are too many cases to handle for the judge, then, let's add more judges (in my country, justice department is starving for budgets).
FB has way too much power, that's its (totally fair) success but now, it's too big to be let alone.
I can't imagine that there are many other single entities that have to deal with the ugliness of humanity at the scale of FB.
The sheer volume of content is unlike anything else humans have ever seen before. By comparison news outlets like the Guardian have the luxury to struggle with these kinds of questions on a 1-off basis.
Given all that I have to wonder how government regulations would make this better?
No no, that would impact free speech.
You want all large user content-handling companies to be able to tell users wanting to talk about X to go somewhere else, and it then has to be legal for those users to make that somewhere else themselves. There's enough idiots screaming about free speech on private platforms already, we don't want more of them.
100k followers is a curiously high threshold to be labeled as a public figure. I'd wager many people who are notable enough to have Wikipedia pages would not be able to hit that threshold even on Twitter.
(a) That there be some recognizable claim of notability --- this is an extremely low bar.
(b) That the notability claim, and any other material in the article, be backed entirely by reliable secondary sources.
(c) That after the article is stripped down to facts that can be verified in reliable secondary sources, there's still an encyclopedia article's worth of content left. This, too, is a very low bar.
Where pages tend to run afoul of WP's notability requirement is item (b).
But it's easy to see --- and to provide examples of --- people that with no public influence at all still having a Wikipedia page.
(Although I'd disagree with your implication that having a wikipedia page should constitute proof of the publics' interest in someone's life, and all the consequences being a "public figure" entails in some jurisdictions)
Notwithstanding the fact that it's Social Network, Inc's platform (and thus property) and you have no free speech rights on someone else's platform. Your right to free speech means the government cannot unduly curtail your speech.
More importantly, I can't come up with a reasonable argument that it's ever constructive to the conversation to be allowed to threaten someone.
The guidelines in the article seem overall reasonable given the range of possibilities versus the number of people working on it. I hope this stays out of the reach of government as long as possible.
Full documentary is free to watch by the creators themselves https://vimeo.com/213152344
https://news.vice.com/video/palestinian-social-media-uprisin...
> Leaderless Palestinian youth, inspired by instructional videos and photos on social media encouraging people to "Stab a Jew," are thought to be behind a new wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank. Uncoordinated and spontaneous attacks by individual young Palestinians, mostly under the age of 25, started to occur almost daily from October 2015, with assailants often using a household weapon — a knife, axe, meat cleaver, screwdriver — before being fired upon by nearby Israeli security forces. So far, the bloodshed has claimed the lives of at least 28 Israelis and 189 Palestinians, 128 of whom Israel says were assailants.
What does it even mean? What are the red and green marks?
What's even weirder to me is that they don't touch upon more examples. It's just so incredibly arbitrary that it can be used to easily cover up anything with zero consequences.
A tick means something can stay on the site; a cross means it should be deleted.
If those documents were public, that (in my opinion) would just enable bullies etc., as they would know exactly what they could get away with. That would then trigger tightening the rules, which would then trigger much complaining about Facebook suppressing free speech etc..
There are also the motivations of whomever wants this out there. Some people may only want the debate, but some want it out there so as to enable the bullies. And others just want the fame and fortune of being the one who published it.
Honestly, this all sucks.
http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-res...
https://www.thefire.org/free-speech-includes-the-right-not-j...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/opinion/who-is-entitle...
A google search showed tons of different opinions and views on what I originally thought was a simple view.
So no its not as simple as people are claiming or saying
As I said, freedom of speech does not automatically transfer into a right to be heard.