Content moderation became an industrial process
logicmag.io
logicmag.io
"So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities."
Clay Shirky, 15 years ago
Being asked by whom? The same person asking us to tolerate the presence of homeless people? Clearly said content is not so universally abhorred if it continues to be produced and made available. What we are actually being asked is to confront the fact that these things exist in our society and that we can't expect them to be kept neatly swept under the rug for us.
As of right now, someone emailing you an unsolicited CP image means you have broken the law, with absolutely no intent on your side. In fact, this is an avenue of attacking someone, but sending them these pictures.
A mens rea would require that the person intended or requested these be sent, and necessitate proof of that.
Long story short, I'm against statutory laws by and large. There's almost always a potential justifiable defense, even to homicide. There's also classes of crimes which aren't crimes if there's no mindful intent.
Mere possession isnt enough; it has to be proven that you sought it, or knew what it was and kept it, and (variable) be in possession of 3 or more artifacts. Keeping it, hiding it in a buried folder and renaming the files using terms common only amongst exploitation rings does not help your defense against any of these factors.
Lots of claims of non-solicitation get made--nobody is going to admit otherwise--but after forensics it always turns out to either truly be a really shitty prank or the recipient was way more involved than they were willing to admit.
Nobody gets prosecuted for simply being on the wrong end of an email. There is always more to the story.
https://yalelawtech.org/2009/11/02/why-mens-rea-should-be-ap...
"In Osborne v. Ohio, the United States Supreme Court explained that laws making possession of pornography a crime, regardless of the circumstances, were constitutional. "
However there are beginning to be some cracks in the strict liability from this case where a 16 year old lied about her age and obtained fake drivers license credentials stating the fraudulent age.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Obviously, each state can have its own laws. But the key here is "strict liability" versus "mens rea". And no, prosecutorial discretion is no substitute for mens rea.
I can imagine this being the case for defamation. 100 people being told "Johnny is a thief" might cause 100 times as much harm to Johnny's social interactions as 1 person being told that. But how does it work for child porn?
As a moral principle, it should not be legal to share these exploitative pictures. In terms of information, every copy of a picture increases the probability that it comes back to haunt the victim.
Finally, many viewers of child pornography find the pictures horrible or even traumatic. Many people are unfazed, but some experience nightmares or severe anxiety, especially investigators and moderators: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/.
I agree that it shouldn’t be legal to possess or share child pornography, but I don’t think it’s a justification for mass invasion of privacy either. When someone is detected with child porn they should be in legal jeapordy, but we don’t need to kill crypto to make that happen.
Privacy rights are also important, and I agree with you that police should respect those rights when investigating child pornography, just as with any other crime.
Communities that end up decimated by drugs tend to have had easy access to them in the years earlier. Drugs and porn both fulfill a cycle of progressively weaker dopamine rushes.
Once a user gets to the point where they need the hard stuff, theyll eventually need harder and this drives demand for further proliferation and production of new content-- the worst possible outcome is the increase of both consumers and producers in the market.
Should people posessing such pictures be treated as harshly as people posessing cp? They certainly are not right now.
I guess intent is different on the production side. It's usually reporting (but often times people just sharing pictures they received from someone, without any censorship or much verification). But what do we know why people want to posess such pictures. It's a picture/video of a horrific crime involving a child, perhaps even more horrific than most CP. I mean how can you compare a child being tickled inappropriately for example with a child intentionally burned by chemicals until it slowly drowns to death because of pulmonary edema.
Sometimes society's rules are hard do make sense of if you try to make sense of them rationally.
Sexual abuse emphasizes dynamics of objectification, humiliation, powerlessness. I'd argue that victims respond more strongly to pictures of sexual abuse than to pictures of physical violence. Wikipedia says that a million children have been abused to produce child pornography, whereas there are few instances of violence to produce pictures of violence. In this sense, child pornography is inseparable from the crime, whereas with violence, there is a distinction between the crime and the documentation.
That said, I do sympathize with the view that sentences for the possession of child pornography are too harsh, especially when viewing pedophilia as a mental disorder. I strongly support efforts to make therapy more accessible, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_Project_Dunkelfeld.
This component is probably not that present in an addiction to gore material. People can be sensitive to the way the material was produced and react differently to accidental/documentary, staged voluntary, or staged involuntary recordings. If you search online you'll find accounts of people being horrified, yet attracted to gore.
Psychology of these things is quite interesting.
I can only hope that the resulting milquetoast is boring enough that the median user actually puts forth the effort to use freer next-gen technologies rather than settle for this technically-lazy "web 2.0" promulgated by Surveillance Valley.
Reddit itself was designed around the idea of multiple communities simultaneously existing on its site, with a low barriers for interacting with a plurality at a time. So "backgrounds and ages" is moot.
As far as unwanted communications, then it's not like Reddit et al are actually currently preventing such things, and not for a lack of trying! This is an edge concern, and in fact can only be fully solved at the edges. Any central solution necessarily relies on post-facto punishment, which necessarily relies on attribution to immutable top-down-imposed identifiers (and if you think this sounds like a good idea, then we really have no common ground!).
I don't expect to be able to convince you, as all I am essentially saying is that the easy answers are not answers. As I said, I just hope the inevitable mediocrity that comes out of centralization is boring enough to drive most everybody to seek out places that are not centrally controlled. Or at the very minimum, that the minority willing to tolerate unsafe speech will be free to go their own way.
Which brings up the point that good moderation is something entirely different. Good moderation involves a person actually emphasizing civil discussion and providing an alternative to argument by shock.
Of course, some fair portion of larger social networking systems today might well be described as "what happens when you remove all moderation" in multiple senses of the term. With that situation actually spilling over into a lot of society with attendant problems (as well as the more invisible problem that real problems get ignored).
Some systems now seem to be aiming for an opposite to this. Kialo is one effort but their approach to debate seems to rigid. A more "personal" approach where the debate is open but assumption of reasonableness is simply implicit would work better imo.
What you are doing is drawing an us-vs-them distinction. It's not healthy for discourse.
It is trivially gamed by malicious actors. It does not reward higher-quality discourse. It rewards overzealous moderators. It rewards edgy or controversial discourse which does not break the guidelines. It rewards users who contribute a bare minimum of information while punishing users who write longer, more informative or interesting posts.
Worst, by what objective measuring device can a post be compared to the guidelines? There are many extremely-subjective suggestions in HN's guidelines alone:
* "Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face."
* "Assume good faith."
* "Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." (Wanna give us a list of flamewar topics, mods?)
* "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle." As I write this, there is an ideological battle between JS frameworks on the front page.
* "On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to."
Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines?
To the best of my ability to determine, every single thing you said in this paragraph is false. Could you explain how you think some of that works? Because, quite frankly, your comments here look like you just want to complain about HN.
> Could you write a script that measures whether an HN post breaks the guidelines?
No. I could evaluate a bunch of posts, though, and I suspect that my evaluation of that bunch of posts would not be statistically different from others' evaluation of them (assuming fairness and no malice on all the evaluators' part, of course).
It's not automeable, and it's not perfect. But it's also not rocket science.
Each platform has its purpose.
They describe 3 models by which this can happen, and the type of moderation you describe is classified as "artisanal" or work shop level moderation.
And I guarantee, every system has been tried, and found wanting.
Because every system which gets anywhere, will attract value and then those who prey on those systems and target the weaknesses of those systems.
A village knew whether someone was yelling obscenities. HN is a smaller community, with its own software.
I think the answer is that there is no good open source software for this.
That's not exactly fair; you can customize Twitter (to some degree, if you use a third party app) and Facebook (to an even smaller degree) to actually get content you care about. (e.g., there's no small forum I can join that'll get me Charles Stross's musings and a video game developer whose updates I like and a podcast's funny tweets.)
RSS used to be great for that sort of thing, but it's been largely superceded by Twitter, etc.
Even in bygone eras there were LOTS of communities like this, and they too had to deal with these issues.
Famously - Jewish communities would get targetted by Nazis, or Holocaust deniers. They would get DDOSed or worse.
Spam, trolls and so on were always there.
Many of the terms we use to describe this problem come from that era.
In the end, you ALWAYS end up depending on moderation. Its not the software - its the wetware.
Any bit of skin or bad word and content is marked NSWF.
Other topics not on paar with the main stream is banned or deleted by moderators. Topics that back a few years ago would have sparked a good and healthy discussion.
Now people live in a filer bubble. Reality is too scary...
Twitter doesn't fully block NSFW content, either. They each have a system requiring a click to unveil or profile setting.
The effect is to obscure the content, so that people just scrolling by won't see it. Someone has to notice it's hidden, trust that it something they do want to see and not a disturbing gore or porn pic, and then click to see it. That has the effect of reducing the reach of the media. It's similar to how people would make messages on the craigslist RnR forum disappear by abusing flagging.
On Reddit, people opposing your message can use voting rings and automation to abuse downvoting, which has the effect of hiding content.
They can complain that your image needs to be NSFW, and ask the moderators to change it. I believe moderators can set it for content, but if you are posting in their sub, you are at their mercy anyway.
So I switched to an RSS feed of the top 20 news publications - in an attempt to get a relatively unbiased feed (obviously still biased, but hopefully at least more moderate) and the picture I get in my political news is very different now.
It's difficult because so many of these subreddits pretend to be neutral but are extremely biased one way or another - often in subtle ways that aren't disclosed or easily discovered.
A lot of their positions (taxation, free education, government spending in infrastructure, universal healthcare, etc.) would be classified as left-leaning or left.
Additionally, I've seen that leftist news sources aren't by any means behind rightist ones in terms of fake news. They just focus on different sets of fake news.
Maybe the fact that you find rightist news more biased is just a result of your own bias. You overlook the bias in the publications that are aligned with your beliefs.
For example, they advocate protecting marijuana legalizing states at the federal level. (https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/marijuana-policy-shou...).
WSJ is definitely fiscally conservative, and otherwise fairly moderate.
Economist is actually quite liberal leaning.
It's possible that your personal bias is very liberal so normal "conservative" positions seem far right. To be fair, news as a whole tends to lean slightly liberal.
http://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 is a decent source for news bias alignment.
On to the point of whether publications like the Economist are left or not. This may be a matter of whether you consider neoliberal policies to be conservative. I personally believe that the Economist's position on privatizing industries, selling national assets, minimizing worker protections in the form of minimum wage laws, etc. to all be extremely conservative.
I happen to be more sympathetic to opening borders to immigration, which the Economist supports. And the Economist is very much anti-death penalty, and, as others have pointed out, they are socially liberal (in the US sense) in a number of other ways. But at the end of the day this is a magazine called The Economist, and their economic views are mostly in direct opposition to mine.
But I'll still read it, because I think it's a mostly fact-based publication.
Economist describe themselves as "extreme centre" and have supported both right and left at different times. So they're likely to remain hard to precisely pin down. :)
The reason for that is the bias of any given position is very difficult to calculate and political identities are heavily nuanced across the entire spectrum. In addition, most people don't subscribe to well fixed ideological positions on most issues - and the line of being moderate shifts over time.
But yes, as I said earlier, most news is a bit liberal leaning so news isn't perfectly aligned and in general there are much more liberal news sources then conservative news sources.
In general your best bet is to read a lot of news sources, understand that all news has some bias (towards increasing readership, as well as a slight liberal lean), and do your best to kind of meet in the middle. Be aware of general logical fallacies and try to correct for them as best you can, and always question everything.
I've started to think the idea of left and right wing are grossly over-simplistic. They might have made sense in the days of mass media where there was no room for personal differences but now you can find popular Youtubers who support a mixture of traditionally left and right ideas.
Trying to make a point about a site that explicitly allows its users to post photos of themselves naked and having sex as being too prudish seems weird.
Like the quality discussion in r/fatpeoplehate? Or the wholesome debates in r/jailbait?
And I think you're confusing admins and moderators. Moderators sometimes do delete certain threads in subreddits they control - but that's what moderation is.