Myanmar group questions Zuckerberg’s claim on Facebook hate speech prevention | Hacker News Reader

Myanmar group questions Zuckerberg’s claim on Facebook hate speech prevention

techcrunch.com

131 pointsabhi336 comments

"In response to critics Facebook vows to do more to monitor its users' messages" - future TechCrunch headline. People might want to think about the unintended consequences of their criticism a bit more.

No, let them dig their own grave. The more they monitor, the more users will abandon them. Once they've lost enough users to limit the network effect their decline will be like that of Myspace. Facebook the company will probably survive due to their other assets - Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever they manage to buy in the mean time - but Facebook the product is destined for the graveyard where it should be buried in unconsecrated ground with a stake through its heart.

Yea, the issue there would not be the criticism. This is a dialogue that needs to happen for society as a whole to figure out what it wants and doesn't want.

Facebook offering no button to report abusive messages in Myanmar does not mean anything about reeading people's personal messages or invading their privacy. It is a simple feature that would help these people and improve their lives by protecting them from abusers on Facebook. But for some reason, Facebook won't implement that feature or even talk to these people about why not, or what else can be done.

There’s something particularly creepy in what Zuckerberg said and what the folks in Myanmar claim.

Zuck says “we detected”, whereas the folks in Myanmar say they explicitly tried to raise the issue.

Having a ‘report and moderate’ capability seems like one thing but from the above, it seems FB believes in constant monitoring and (presumably) censoring — which is something else entirely. Combine that with a country where “Facebook is the internet”, and it’s quite scary.

If you find above creepy, you should probably be creeped out by spam filters too (for at least 20 years now). Those are some third parties deciding what will get into your mailbox and what will not, based on questionable criteria.

There were several business opprotunities just this year that vanished just because email providers of people who inquired to me over e-mail blocked my responses with 5xx error. Those people just think I ignored them, but in reality it was their provider censoring e-mail. They're not in control of their e-mail so they will never know.

What's actually creepy here is that some unknown person is sending unsolicited messages about a group of people organizing to harm the receipient, and seemingly doing this en-masse for many users.

To put it charitably, "We detected" could also mean "A bunch of people sent in reports."

According to reports, invitations to lynchings of Rohingya are shared on Messenger. If you say freedom of speech, I say Facebook and all of it's evil is banned.

I think I have the better case.

So if it's shared over SMS, we should ban the mobile network?

In most Western countries this would be a crime and the mobile network would be obliged to provide an intercept.

The invitations could also be shared via word of mouth (there were no problems organizing them in the 1800s US), POTS, postcards, email or GNU social.

Technology can be used for good or evil. Some technology is used predominantly for the former, some for the latter. Some empowers the latter more, or has to be used incredibly carefully to avoid bad outcomes.

You can kill people with sharp sticks, or with nuclear weapons. You would be incredibly shortsighted to throw your arms up in despair, and say that shucks, technology is amoral, ethics is hard, nothing to see here, it's all the same, let's all move on.

If Facebook wants to take credit for the good (Connecting people), they also need to take blame for the bad (Connecting lynch mobs with their victims.) If the bad outweighs the good, then we need to eliminate it.

I'm not really willing to give them credit for the good ("connecting people"): I was perfectly well connected before they started pulling in all of my friends into their network effect. If I were to break down and get on Facebook, I wouldn't give them a single drop of goodwill out of the buckets of goodwill between friends that they had weaseled themselves into being the courriers of. So, no, I don't give them any credit for what people write in Messenger.

They're connecting people.

You really really don't. If it's done over email should we ban emails?

>Facebook is not equipped to respond to hate speech in international markets since it relied entirely on information from the ground, where Facebook does not have an office, in order to learn of the issue.

It seems to me that rather than hire a bunch of people in California to try and understand local feuds all over the planet they should have a gamified system a bit more like stackoverflow where if you get enough karma you can restrict posts, promote peaceful messages and so on.

In fact someone could offer the anti-hate thing as a service. There's a hackathon/startup project for someone.

This is not a non-story. This is Mark Zuckerberg either lying or not knowing anything about current issues on Facebook. This is not a pile-on or beating a dead horse like all the comments in other Facebook threads are saying about this rash of Facebook stories. Mark Zuckerberg's false confidence/lies about how Facebook is handling the issue of user's private data is sufficient story in an of itself.

These people are lying like their jobs depend upon it, because they do. Here's Sheryl Sandberg today:

> I don’t think that’s true and I don’t think that’s fair. Facebook at its core is a sharing service. We are not sweeping up data. People are inputting data. People are sharing data with Facebook.

-- https://www.marketwatch.com/Story/facebook-coo-sheryl-sandbe...

Where have I heard the word "sharing" before? If they accomplish nothing else, these companies will have killed a word that used to mean an act of generosity.

I think ‘the sharing economy’ already did that.

"This is Mark Zuckerberg either lying or not knowing anything about current issues on Facebook."

This sums up my general reaction that has been built up over time with how things have been handled. I'm sure that Zuckerberg is playing the PR route sometimes, but more often than not, my suspicion is that it's more about incompetence and cringe-worthy cluelessness than anything else.

The Facebook offices I've seen are filled with posters and messages that are more inclusive and respectful across different cultures and minorities. While there, it felt like I was looking at my own Facebook news feed. But compare that with other family member's feeds and their world is vastly different. Filled with fear about minorities, making false claims about history, countries, events, and medicine, and blatant lies that are obviously aimed at aggregating power to a select few. When the idea of fake news and Russian interference surfaced, the general reaction from Zuckerberg came across "lol - wat? That's not even a thing." There's been enough data points since then that shows his incompetence, be it deliberately lying or being completely clueless. For me, I've hit a point where trust is broken. Not just with leadership, but with the platform in general.

> The Facebook offices I've seen are filled with posters and messages that are more inclusive and respectful across different cultures and minorities.

Most cults use positive imagery to keep the flock drinking the kool-aid. All these posters indicate is Facebook's desire to keep their developers believing that they're working for some kind of altruistic company looking to "improve the world".

They are.

I do not see the issue with this letter to Zuckerberg as suggested by some of the comments here.

I see the issue as one of Zuckerbergs choice of words, how he is portraying the facts.

It was his words in the interview that triggered the letter.

FB has now apologised for Zuckerbergs comment:

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/2018-04-06-faceb...

Facebook users and others are paying very careful attention to what Zuckerberg says.

Here is a piece that discusses why choice of words can be important, for example when giving testimony before US Congress. There are some provocative examples from past CEOs who have appeared to testify.

https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2018/04/06/what-to-...

Whether "trust" matters to FB business (selling ads) is another question.

Poll: Does FB need to have trust to succeed in the future?

Yes. But people need to understand why trust matters to them, or they won’t care about it.

FB people, if this isn't your canary, than what is?

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