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Comment by jdp23 | Hacker News Reader

only women were affected. Facebook's got several anti-woman policies (for example banning pictures of breast-feeding, and prohibiting domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms) but in this case they're blaming a bug. it would be it would be interesting to hear more about what the actual issue is.

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I frequently get friend requests from fake profiles on Facebook (sometimes as many as 2-3 per week). They always list themselves as having gone to my high school (which is why I am positive they are fake, since I went to a tiny high school), and they always are attractive-looking women. I do not list my sex on Facebook, but it is possible that the bot recognizes my first name as male and therefore friends me with a female profile, and that there are other spam profiles which are male, but I am almost certain this is not the case since I see in my news feed whenever one of my high school friends falls for the spammer, and they are again always female profiles. So I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of spam profiles on Facebook are of females.

The most widespread method of stopping spam in any form is to use flags to train an machine learning algorithm that picks out particular patterns in spam. These algorithms don't have political agendas, they just pick out common characteristics of spam. It is therefore entirely unsurprising that any such spam detector would learn to only flag women, and therefore to be expected that a bug in that algorithm which generated false positives would affect only women's profiles.

The reason you are downvoted is not because you are trying to highlight women's issues (I got 50+ karma for calling out another comment as sexist against women a few weeks ago), but because you were quick to imply a sexist motive for behavior that most any hacker would have immediately recognized as a natural consequence of how poorly-performing spam-detectors behave.

a spam detector that's biased against women certainly could account for this behavior.

why don't you see that as sexist?

They don't ban breastfeeding images, they ban images of breasts. They don't ban domestic violence survivors from using pseudonyms, they ban pseudonyms.

It is easy to make a subset of a policy appear discriminatory. For example, Facebook ban black people from creating multiple profiles. Clearly racist, until you consider they ban everyone from creating multiple profiles.

it's easy for people to find ways to justify a discriminatory policy as even-handed. you're right, though, they also ban pictures of guys breast-feeding.

At least that's who vocalized having been affected. For all we know, the disabled majority could have been Men, but didn't care enough to complain about it on Twitter.

But they care enough to complain on the behalf of their female friends and relatives? Possible but unlikely, I think.

oh look, once again i mentioned gender and got downvoted. funny how that works.

You didn't get downvoted for mentioning gender. You got downvoted for strawmans.

i didn't propose any explanations why i got downvoted, just observed the pattern.

it sounds like you're saying that any time i mention gender, people see it as a strawman, and so downvote it. why do you think that is?

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