Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I am from NZ and a muslim and have watched the video myself an hour after the incident, I know people personally affected by this and I think we all need to come together as human beings and understand that there are some evil ideas and people everywhere around the world.
And that's the challenge we face that wouldn't go away because of censorship and putting our heads in the sand.
It's the inadvertent exposure that's more of a problem. The access is just so easy. If you were browsing at the time it was happening, you almost couldn't not watch the video because it was so prevelant.
I'm imagining a 16 year old coming across it, and wondering how they process it.
I made a conscious choice/effort not to watch it and 99% succeeded. But there are moments I couldn't miss because they were everywhere.
By the way, that's not burying my head in the sand. It's more about respecting the dead and not needing to see it to understand the darkness in some people.
I've posted a ... friendly notice to Google about this.
As for the 16 year old, it wasn't long ago that by 16 you'd have seen a few of your siblings and friends succumbed to illness or accident.
Death used to be part of life and we dealt with it.
But that doesn't mean I need or want to tune into the live-action progress of a disgusting, terrorist attack.
Or Twitter can implement a "do not autoplay sensitive content" feature.
I don't care how it's dealt with, but I prefer it not to be a part of my regular online diet.
Can't you just pass it over without clicking, like with the hundreds/thousands of other offered-but-unwanted links one encounters in daily web/app usage?
It was beneath the top trending hashtag on twitter. Initially, it was absolutely not obvious what the video was that kept appearing. Sometimes it would auto play.
Obviously rapidly it became clear what was going on ... and then it was a basic game to escape ... and then to just switch off social media.
Honestly ... there are some f@cking weird questions asked about this subject on HN.
Do you mind if I ask your age and general location? I'm really curious.
(I'm a pretty heavy user of social media, especially Twitter & Facebook, but as none of my friends/followees/groups posted raw video, I only saw the headlines and generic 'aftermath' photos common on mainstream news sites.)
If you (or parent poster ~TheTruth1234) found this unwanted, wouldn't unfollowing or blocking the source accounts be an adequate remedy?
(It is a embarrassing mess, but par for Twitter's lackadaisical approach software quality, that Twitter web often ignores their own settings' "don't autoplay" toggle, and has for many months.)
I saw ISIS propaganda videos at around the age of 16. The ones where they kill people in various ways. Nothing else in life has made me disgusted by other people as much as those videos did. I'm reminded of the videos when I read about ISIS. It strengthens my view that ISIS is a group that needs to be fought.
Every public interaction you make is an excuse for Facebook to shove it in the face of your friends. If you see this and angry-like it, it pops up on a few hundred more feeds. Rinse, repeat. Viral.
Facebook is particularly bad because their moderation team appears to be staffed exclusively by a pile of libertarian twelve year olds. I've flagged local drug sales, sexually explicit content (no, not casual or functional nudity) many times and had my flags rejected.
Not on a site someone else owns and operates they don’t.
Oh wait.
Your belief that you'd be ok with it or even find that a positive outcome means pretty much nothing unless you're one of the people on that video.
I'd like to pentest that. Here are some real and hypothetical cases that should be easier to defend:
* thousands of people access scientific journal articles through scihub
* thousands of people copy books from an illegal mirror of the corpus of digital books from UC libraries that Google scanned for Google books
* millions of people sharing copyrighted digital music and videos
Do you also publicly defend without reservation the behavior of the people in my bullet points above on free speech grounds? Should such users and publishers be defended in their endeavors on free speech grounds?
World is complicated and no censorship doesn't work when a society has 50% that never went to school.
That sounds like a good long term solution!
It doesn’t all seem purely about this case of whether a social network should be required to distribute propaganda videos of mass murder.
Personally I don’t get why people are okay with distribution of child porn being illegal, but think that distribution of mass murder videos shouldn’t be illegal AND ALSO now apparently must be required of any internet company.
Is it really so hard to understand that some people draw the line between the two things you mentioned? Especially when those advocating it not be illegal, may consider the video of mass murder to be news, or audiovisual documentation worthy of preserving as evidence of the events that have transpired.
I know that people draw a line, that’s implicit from me saying that people make the distinction between those two things. What I said was personally I don’t understand why they draw that line.
> news, or audiovisual documentation worthy of preserving as evidence of the events that have transpired.
They can archive and preserve it themselves, or using services that want to facilitate that, and be subject to whatever local laws may permit or prohibit that. As you said laws vary by jurisdiction.
The anger at FB for not wanting to be party to disseminating this video of a horrific crime really is hard to understand.
Edit: isn't that hard to find because of Bing article on it https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/unsafe-search/
The world is dark and full of terrors (but getting better every day), and sticking our heads in the sand doesn't change that.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-16/nz-threatens-10-ye...
Shakespeare's typing monkeys come to mind.
On the other hand, perhaps if we think about everything at a more reasonable level, we can see why some digital things should be illegal, just as some physical things should be illegal.
What's next, illegal source code?
Maybe you should just start with illegal thoughts right off the bat?
I find that these kind of reductive arguments floated for digital subjects fall apart when you remove the computer from the equation.
The “illegal numbers” concept is something I find interesting. Just because a certain number can be used to decrypt BluRays, it’s illegal
128 bits is about the threshold where a "number" stops behaving like our intuition of a number, and starts being rare enough that you won't arrive at an "illegal" number by counting or chance, i.e. it is now a "file" for all practical purposes: https://qntm.org/number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine
> The following pronouncement of the void for vagueness doctrine was made by Justice Sutherland in Connally v. General Construction Co., 269 U.S. 385, 391 (1926):
> [T]he terms of a penal statute [...] must be sufficiently explicit to inform those who are subject to it what conduct on their part will render them liable to its penalties… and a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law.
Edit: Or perhaps the "implicit" part of your post is that you're referring to the ISP incident in NZ, and not Facebook?
That 757 video was played on repeat for weeks on all of the major channels in 2001. Hundreds of people turning into a fireball over and over.
It made it real for us.
By hiding the video from ChristChurch, people have to imagine how awful the event was. And they'll fall back to the stylized Hollywood notions of violence as a reference point. There are no heroic close-ups in this footage (I found a copy).
If you want people to get upset about this and take action, you show them the truth. It would repulse almost everyone.
So, since a very very small part of Internet consumers venture out of the big social and old media sites, by not hosting it there they will never see it.
Streisand effect notwithstanding, this is effectively tempting everyone with an ounce of curiosity to seek out the dark corners of the internet that they may have never had a reason to visit before.
It also isn't "purged from the internet".
But here's 65+ people vaporizing from 18 different angles. On YouTube. These are not different. They are footage of a terrorist attack.
It does document the attacks, that much is true. And in that regard it is the same as footage of 9/11 – but beyond that there is a distinction here.
Don’t be confused by simplification. Do take into account context, intent and author.
(That said, I do think that you can question whether it was wise to play video of the planes flying into WTC basically on repeat during those days.)
There's no other way to truly understand what happened unless you see it. Regardless of who filmed it.
However, I do question the need for everyone to watch the video to understand what happened. That doesn’t really seem to follow for me.
If it was an opinion-free, propaganda-free raw unedited video of a newsworthy event that was filmed in a public place, then it probably shouldn't be banned—though publishers should still act responsibly if the material contains deeply offensive or distressing material, or if it has serious privacy implications.
And that's just a proposed set of principles I came up with after three minutes of consideration—I'm sure with an extra 15 minutes we could come up with something even better. Point is, this isn't difficult. The fact that there are no bright clear lines doesn't preclude us as a society from drawing a line somewhere.
I'll also note that ISIS does a lot more editing and commentary to slant the content in their favor than this guy did. About all this guy did was make meme references... I can see an argument that this is quite different.
Humans are largely visual creatures. If we don’t witness something, we have a tendency to treat it as less ‘real’. Doubly so when it happens half a world away: atrocities and their victims become almost theoretical.
Actually witnessing a video record changes our perception dramatically. The victims cease to be faceless ‘others’, and we receive a somber reminder that a maniac slaughtered husbands, wives, sons, and daughters—real people that could be your friends, family, or neighbors. The sense of tragedy and the casual brutality of it sinks in, and we are forced to acknowledge the evil among us.
In the U.S., where so many of these tech companies reside, we have become so bitterly polarized that many among us demonize nearly half our fellow countrymen on the basis of their political affiliations. At times like this, we could be coming together in our mutual disgust over this atrocity. Seeing it for ourselves is, perhaps, less important than seeing that those we condemn politically react with the same humanity that we do.
In a time when some people seem to honestly believe that “those [other half of the country] want to destroy everything everything I care about” we could use a reminder that, hey, we’re all people, and none of us deserve to die like that. And maybe then we could start working together to build a world that isn’t so conducive to hate.
All the talk about social media is just a distraction for the real issues that politicians don't want to face: gun laws. We probably shouldn't be selling crazy people weapons of mass destruction. But sure, blame Facebook for letting people post videos...
I'm not sure how honest you're being with your comment but there's clearly a line where news reporting jumps from showing something to communicate the facts to something that is gratuitous + glorifying the guilty + insulting to the victims + traumatising to family and friends.
It's not easy to describe exactly where that line is but you'd have to be completely tone deaf or trolling to make such a simple comparison between these videos.
The video of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém in Vietnam was huge in turning opinion even harder against war.
The best way to prevent propagandistic spin is to make sure the raw footage is available.
People need stark reminders what trillions in military funding is buying them. It's exactly that. They need to see what lax gun laws enable, what warmongering is, what war is.
They're not now and I think we don't value life as much because most of us don't know how abrupt and cold death actually is.
Doesn't NZ have strict gun laws?
That's different though. This video has been released by the perpetrator. Do you think beheadings videos released by ISIS should be easily accessed by anyone on Facebook?
Peta wouldn't release "inside the factory farm" footage if it was an effective way to galvanize an audience.
But showing this to your aunt who's wishy washy about gun control will probably disgust her into action.
Relevant quote: "Previously we have risked the ire of viewers by refusing to show the glossy promo videos for ISIS. The ones shot on DSLR's, with depth of field, careful framing, and murders stage managed for the camera. Whilst we may carry media showing the most terrible of events we don't want to be a vehicle of choice for those who carry these events out. This is a very important distinction for us."
Christchurch is grainy helmet cam. Not highly produced propaganda.
I've no interest in seeing the video, but I understand they marked the ammunition clips with messages seen on camera. Several have been quoted in reporting. That sounds very like a deliberate attempt to make a propaganda piece of the footage. I would hope that Liveleak would rule out carrying it on the same justification.
Phone cam footage from a victim or innocent bystander is far easier to consider documentation, and make a case it should be seen.
It does not have a message. It doesn't function as propaganda.
Why did he film it? why publish a rant? why write things on his guns?
to try to push his shitville excuse of a view. To embolden other shitists. Do sow fear and anger into the non-shit.
I'm not interested in this video or the man's opinions.
But I strongly believe that the footage should be available so people can see just how horrifying it was.
If you want people to take terrorism seriously, they need to really really understand how terrifying it is. Names and numbers don't do that. Watching another human go from walking and talking to stone cold dead in an instant does do that.
explain yourself!
But to me, it's utility as documentation of a tragedy outweighs it's utility as propaganda.
But to me, it's utility as documentation of a tragedy outweighs it's utility as propaganda.
What an absurd thing to say about a terrorists propaganda video.
But the video has a message and is part of a message that he wanted to send by the act itself. The message is his manifesto that was published along side with it. Also the guns in the video have a message. It's hard to read, but that was solved by news media that gladly published it in its entirety.
Perfect example, but not of what you're claiming. Police bodycam footage is frequently released in partial, edited form as propaganda. When it doesn't appear to exonerate the cops, police departments often fight its release.
There’s a reason that isn’t a defense, and I hope you already understand why that is.
1) That probably is a valid defense in some countries
2) It is completely reasonable to ask for an articulate link between a crime and some sort of victim, otherwise the crime shouldn't exist. "It is obvious" is only for crimes with a very obvious victim.
For child pornography, I assume the link is because people might be selling it for cash which is harder to trace and collecting it might be supporting a community through, say, ad revenue. Because while it is sick, I don't see how curating a private, personal collection could feasibly cause harm to anyone and hence it seems like a waste of money to prosecute without some sort of connection to how it is profiting CP providers.
I've thought that the countries that criminalise cartoon depictions of child porn have gone too far. It may be obscene, but possession shouldn't be a crime. Literally nobody could be suffering from it.
2.) Your opinion is at odds with the laws of virtually every country on Earth. Countries that can’t agree on things as simple as diet, or whether gay people should be allowed to live still manage to agree on this.
2) I doubt you've actually read my opinion properly, it was that the link between crime and victim should be articulated on request. That is going to be a very popular opinion in the civilized world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_child_pornography
I’m speaking to the usual exception “online libertarians” tend to accept, and pointing out the hypocrisy there. Of course adults being raped or murdered is equivalent, but this is a limited format for communication and my desire to cover every possible permutation is precisely 0.
That said, it is interesting to me how platforms are going to deal with transformative "fair use" cases. The obvious scenario is news coverage which excerpts/screenshots the video. But I've also seen clips of the raw footage being shared by Muslim/Arabic-speaking groups on Twitter, seemingly in the context of wanting to point out to their community the horrific reality they face. It being Twitter, the posts are visible to the world even if it's meant for a specific audience. I didn't bookmark the tweet, but I assume these videos got taken down. But I wonder if the users faced different sanctions. They are significantly different in situtation than those sharing the video to glorify the shooter.
What standing do they have to prevent distribution of the video?
That's not what standing means[1]. At least in the US, if the video was recorded legally[2], there's nothing you can really to do prevent publication of it. The laws are stricter if you're using it for commercial purposes, but it's not the case here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)
[2] You could argue that the shooting was illegal, so therefore the recording was also illegal, but that's a stretch.
because I'm not a new zealand lawyer, but both US and new zealand uses common law, so I'm using that as a point of reference. I'm not trying to say "it's x in the US therefore it's x in new zealand". If you can find an authoritative source that confirms what the legal status is, feel free to post it.
>their requests for cooperation.
The people posting/sharing those videos aren't going to comply with nicely worded "requests for cooperation". If they want something taken down, they'll need assistance of the legal system.
>the event was in a private place of worship and not a public landmark
The relevant doctrine here would be expectation of privacy[1]. You're right that it's not a public landmark, but I argue it's still a public place considering that there are dozens of strangers around and you can come and go as you please (they don't seem to check membership), thus you don't really have any expectation that it's private.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy
>there were minors in the footage
There is a legal doctrine that gives special treatment to minors?
>Last but not least, Facebook specifically sells ads on their pages
This could work, although you could argue that the poster himself isn't making any money so it's okay. Also, if this did work, I'd expect way more public freakout videos to be taken down off video platforms by their subjects, which doesn't seem to be the case right now. At the very least you could sidestep this issue by hosting it offsite or via torrent/ipfs.
>In addition, the footages being disseminated are technically illegal copies.
This is only true because the author hasn't yet given explicit permission for people to use it. He's alive in jail right now, so this could easily be rendered moot by him proclaiming (via a lawyer) that he releases the video to the public domain (which I'm sure he would do). Even if he didn't give permission (eg. he got killed), copyright infringement is a civil matter, so only the author (or his estate) can go after violators. The state sure wouldn't be able to send takedown requests using this method.
Yes it is.
> What if any of the victims in the video didn’t want the video to be disseminated?
They don't get to decide that.
> So we are OK with corporate cease and desist letters on youtube.
No
That said, this massive wave of censorship across MSM, NZ ISPs, regardless of the motivation, is very disturbing. It will be inevitably used to suppress citizens' freedoms, it will cause more tension in society that will escalate into more tragical incidents. Also, the video may serve someone to study modus operandi of such an attacker to increase their chances of survival in a similar situation. Either way, the censorship and attempts at rewriting history (removal of Spacey, Jackson), again banning inconvenient books are extremely dangerous and slippery slope to get on.
If ever there was an apt description of youth services, or the justice system. And yes, I get it, in both cases, it merely describes the terrible crimes and abuses happening in 99% of those systems. For the remaining 1% of cases, they are necessary.
Cause I haven't seen the video once. I haven't been offered to neither.
You have to take some responsibility at some point. Always asking the rest of the world to do good by you is only going to lead you so far.
Do you need everything to be labeled and rated by someone else before consumption?
Don't search for and click on videos of the shooting? Sure, it won't stop someone specifically trying to get you to watch the video. But censorship doesn't change that. No amount of censorship can keep people from, say, adding some noise to the video to circumvent any filters and sending it to you.
If you want to make it so that no site owner can moderate their own site, you are going to have a huge uphill battle. And I can't imagine why you would want that kind of world.
Today it is you who says we gotta censor what you find offensive, tomorrow President Orange-Nimrod will censor all of CNN because it's OK now to censor things that somebody/anybody finds offensive, and in a few decades time President Jenna Bush Hager will censor all depictions of an Earth that isn't flat because those are offensive to the good god-fearing citizens who are true to the word of the Bible.
No one is saying the NZ video should be purged from the internet. But it is foolish to equate censorship with private social media companies scrubbing it from their sites. You are welcome to search out other venues that host the video, or host it yourself. Your rights are not being infringed upon if Twitter and Facebook won't.
Common carriers, like Telstra (largest mobile Australian ISP), started blocking websites hosting the video. That's not OK for an ISP to do. Same as it isn't OK for e.g. a utility company to cut off power to a "nazi" (whatever that means these days) or to Bernie Sanders supporters because the utility CEO doesn't like "socialism".
Private entities actually hosting the content would be a different matter, and the decision should be up to the private entity. Unless such a private entity is a de facto common carrier in itself. I'd argue Facebook, twitter, reddit, google e.g. are de facto common carriers running general purpose platforms - given their size, influence and reach - even according to their own PR. They are analogous to a utility company, and saying "you can host the content on your own server" is like saying "you can just run your own generator for your electricity needs/use solar panels and battery" or like saying "you can always create your own telephone network if you don't like what the companies are doing; all it takes is 2 old cans and a string".
In my opinion common carrier and de facto common carriers should not be allowed to outright censor lawful content. Videos of newsworthy terrorist attacks, no matter if it is made by a terrorist (e.g. this one) or just an innocent bystander (e.g. 9/11, Las Vegas), are not illegal and should not be allowed to be censored by such de facto common carriers/de facto utility companies.
I have seen zero proposed solutions or ways of combating the rise of white supremacists because so far, the market place of ideas has not been successful. You're saying that there's a massive wave of censorship, yet white supremacist materials, videos and activity has never been more open and easy to access.
No suggestions, or ways to help.
This is meant to be a meeting place of intelligent, creative, resourceful people.
Instead of just saying "it's too difficult, lets do nothing" why not think of answers.
No, you have only missed them. The solution is exactly free speech and more of it. These days people are often suppressed when they voice a concern that touches certain topics, i.e. immigration, religion and particularly Islam, anti-semitism, rapid changes of demographics and many more. Media oppression and flat out censorship do not make a stop to the opinions they try to suppress. They just drive them away, to hidden forums, to non-mainstream platforms, to dark web.
So instead of shunning white supremacists from media - tolerate them on and challenge them with arguments, explain how they are wrong, educate them, ridicule their nonsense; but never censor them.
I keep seeing people repeat this view, but I see none of it. You're attempting to divert away from my point in that you don't propose an actual solution at all. You propose nothing except maintaining the status quo. Arguing against a white supremacist gives legitimacy to their views, because they don't argue on the same level as you or I. They knowingly make illogical arguments that you simply cannot refute and they don't care even if you try.
You will never have a debate in good faith with a white supremacist, as it's an inherently irrational position. Don't waste your breath on them.
This takes the mistaken position that social media is a good tool for discussion and debate, and we have plenty of evidence to the contrary at this point.
This is also the same thought process that leads to ideologies like climate change-denialism, evolution-denialism, anti-vaxxing, etc. to be given oxygen when they shouldn't. It assumes that by shining the light on these topics, the debate should result in people rejecting them, but in reality it simply gives them more credibility. We live in a post truth era, where people don't use the internet to debate and agree on what is write and wrong and rethink our opinions, but to form bubbles with people who agree with what we want to believe, which we leave occasionally to scream at each other, and then retreat to in order to insulate ourselves from reality.
The people who are driven to non-mainstream forums such as 8chan that comprise the scum of the internet are already fairly radical in their thinking. That's why they seek out those sites. But non-radical thinkers may be susceptible to radicalization by giving a platform on a mainstream site like Twitter or Youtube to idealogies like white supremacy, militant Islam, or violent misogyny.
> I have seen zero proposed solutions or ways of combating the rise of white supremacists because so far, the market place of ideas has not been successful.
The moderate nationalists like Taylor have been purged from common media. He is equated to the exact same as the shooter.
After a Muslim terrorist attack we all call for moderate Muslims to help engage in dialog to talk radical ones out of violence. But in the case of nationalist terrorism that is no where to be seen.
If you ever listen to interviews of former nationalists, dialog is what got the to change their position. Not once did no platforming or throwing bottles at them work. There was an interview with one on CNN last week about this.
The original topic (the headline) was about censorship
> Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos
and it's what the comments addressed. People were commenting about the topic that was being addressed. They weren't diverting anything; you were.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1903/S00171/sharing-shootin...
I can personally see the logic of this. This is not a video from an innocent bystander, but a video from a murderer designed to perpetuate hate. I'm generally anti-censorship, but I think this is a form of hate speech and society as a whole does not benefit from its dissemination.
This video is historical fact, the most direct record of an important terrible event that had wide-ranging effect and became global news. Its accessibility helps squash rumors about what people think happened or didn't happen. Combined with the manifesto, it also shows why it happened.
I believe it's becoming increasingly clear that merely allowing far-right dialogue online is essentially responsible for ease of radicalization, and that proactive censorship would be the best approach to forestall this.
But now that some political power that we don't like is emerging, well, a lil censorship never hurt anyone huh?
This very discussion forum is moderated, and very well as far as I can see. Do you think it would somehow be better if the mods weren't here?
It gets morally messy when you consider scale. At what point does it cross over from reasonable moderation to censorship? If Facebook were a country, it would the largest country in the world. Is it okay to censor two billion people because Facebook is not an "official government"?
I'm not against moderation at all but at a certain scale does it cease being only moderation? I would argue yes, but at what point? That's trickier to answer and I can't really say I know.
EDIT: To make my view clear here, Facebook and others are free to remove the videos, I'd prefer if they age-gated and put a warning on them instead, but that's their choice. What I don't like is the way that that some police agencies have been suggesting that mere possession of the video is illegal.
The worst part here is that the attacker himself was suggesting that by hitting on ideas like free speech and the right to bear arms he'd be able to "accelerate" the deepening of political divides. I do not want to be put in a place where I'm forced to choose between fundamental rights and respect for entire races of people, but at this rate I fear that decision time may be approaching. Given time I hope cooler heads will prevail.
Because of course, censorship only blocks the material you personally don't want others to view and never material you personally would want others to view. I can see a lot of politicians, especially those getting elected nowadays, wanting to block any discussion of minority rights, LGTBQ+ rights, trans rights, drug reform, abortion, women's health, women's rights, climate change, non-christian religion discussions, etc, etc, etc.
edit: Note that this isn't a straw man argument. All it takes is one to look at the censorship that happened in the US in the 50s and 60s (comic code, movie/television code, mccarthyism, etc. ) to see what is possible.
Publications, preachers, performances, etc. change people’s behaviour and beliefs — if they didn’t, nobody would advertise or campaign. That change can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on your point of view.
I want the spread of harmful memes to be slowed (and, if possible, prevented), but I also ask myself “What if I’m wrong about what is harmful?” — for example, I don’t believe in the Christian god, and have seen harm done in his name, but what if he actually does exist and banning Christian memes condemns people to hell?
Or sexuality? I know people whose sexuality has been outlawed this decade in much of western Europe, as a result of campaigns by people totally convinced that their preferences are innately harmful, which side is right?
I think solving this is also an important part of safe A.I., so it would still be a very important problem for me even if I didn’t know people directly affected.
Regardless, censorship on the internet is inherently ineffective. If this speech is banned from Facebook, it will move to other forums. If it's made illegal, it will move to the "dark web".
The only real solution to combat this sort of thinking is to debate it directly, refuting arguments rather than shutting them down entirely.
All things considered, I'm not convinced that censoring extreme far-right contents is a long-term net negative for freedom of speech. (Well, it could be, but it's not a given.)
No, but they'd need to pass laws and fight court battles to enable censorship versus merely taking over existing systems of censorship. The latter is much easier to do and much harder to notice or right against. Especially when merely fighting against it is grounds for censorship.
>Yes, but on the other hand, the prevalence of far-right dialogue contributed to the rise of far-right politicians.
Depends on the scale you look at. In a sense, the far right is merely the average person's view as of 50-ish years ago. Censoring to the view of the average person merely ensures that in 50 years you'll be seen as having helped far right ideas. Or in a different way, I don't believe that my current views are the pinnacle of progressiveness (or morality or whatever) and I am loathe to prevent future progressives from being able to push their views forward.
I don't think that's a significant hurdle to any politician with popular support.
Look at Trump, for example, not because I hate him (well I do, but that's not the point here), but because he is a good example of what a politician can do. He rammed into the freaking Supreme Court a candidate that was accused as rapist. And there was nothing the opposition could do.
And the crazy thing is, Trump doesn't even enjoy unanimous support. Far from it.
There's not much you can do once a politician is at power, has a semblance of popular support, and is willing to forego established political norms. Laws? They will change laws, they will take their matter to courts, and they will win.
So I'm still not convinced it's a net positive to have an uncompromising legal roadblock against censorship, when the cost is to increase the chance that someone will rise to power and kick that roadblock away like a tin can.
However, censorship is exactly the wrong thing to do.
If these pockets of knowledge are cordoned off, and inaccessible to causal observers then fewer people will know about them. There will be less people who are well versed in the ideas, and as a result fewer who are able to identify and explain their limits and context. This makes it far easier to radicalize folks.
It's also super intuitive, of course censorship increases radicalization. That's why a corrupt government censors, to have better control of and more precisely manipulate their beliefs. Something that wouldn't be possible if everyone had more information.
So yeah, I disagree.
4chan (and even more so, 8chan) are the pure essence of no censorship, yet everything from Holocaust denial to rampant racism and sexism thrive and fester and spread. The most persuasive ideas are those that are short, easy to digest, and blame someone who's not you for your misery. The truth, well, it can be messy and complicated, and I'm not sure you can get there without shutting down the puerile voices screaming memes of hatred.
Yet this is not the case. Why?
Facebook isn’t required by law to pull down the video. They pull down the video because it’s not profitable (shareholders)
4chan is an example of a pure free market of ideas. Yet only the most toxic of ideologies seem to survive. Why is this the case?
You can find the same content on reddit that you find in 4chan. The difference is Condé Nast will remove subreddits because it looks bad and hurts their bottom line. 4chan doesn’t have share holders, they barely have advertisers.
Toxic ideologies survives on the Chan because there is no one worried about profit there’s no one to answer to. The entire internet use to be the same way.
+ We fundamentally change how the Internet works and introduce an omnipotent overseer that enforces norms and behavior. We have to go all the way with this in order to reap the security benefits, half-measures - what we have today - won't work. If we do go all the way, we find ourselves living in a hellish dystopia. This is the top-down, centralized approach.
+ We realize that the only way out is through and ride the wave of rapid information propagation on the Internet, waiting for bottom-up reorganization to take place and the emergence of something new. Censorship has no place here. Extreme points of view should be allowed to diffuse-disperse by exposing them to the rest of the system. This is the decentralized, cybernetic approach.
More to the point, it is my view that events many will see as extreme will keep on happening regardless of which way we choose to go. Today, we are not dealing with increased discussion and development of new ideas (printing press). The feedback loops are getting short enough to give rise to cognitive metasystems. It follows that some blowback will occur. We are watching force projection/meatspace interaction from cognitively dissonant emergent hive minds. This is exactly what bottom-up reorganization looks like. Expect it to intensify.
1. Platforms weight/select for content that is updated frequently and drives views.
2. Established/agreed upon information is much less likely to get that fed to you.
Consider the flat earth folks, they are churning out thousands of videos on that topic. How often are spherical earthers updating their YouTube channels? And I see similar happening with extremist communities: a flood of ideas and video that just seem unhinged and I'd rather ignore, but in doing so it furthers this gap.
If we want less division we should be listening more to each other not less.
On a similar note I recently watched this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc and completely agree with its premise.
...
People are going to jump on you for this, but I feel it's necessary to put this in perspective.
Ten years ago, the threat of domestic radicalization was a hot topic, except it concerned radicalization towards fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.
Twitter, Google et al. devoted resources towards identifying Islamic terrorist propaganda, accounts and networks, and then silenced them all.
Today, the threat of domestic radicalization comes from the far right. We should at least be honest and consistent when considering the threat and how we've handled such threats in the past.
The shooter was self described as an eco-fascist and claimed his motivation were two events covered widely by the mainstream media. He was very clearly "of the internet", but are you convinced that deleting "far-right dialogue" would have stopped him?
What about the current state of journalism and politics, which was also very clearly something he aimed to exploit and seems to have manipulated at a far more effective level than past attacks?
Where do we hear conspiracy theories about "the great replacement"[1] coming from? CNN or people like Lauren Southern[2][3]?
Or, the fact that he literally states what he wants (it's the 14 words):
> What do you want?
> We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Replacement_conspira...
Did you forget the dozen or so pages ranting about "white genocide" and "the great replacement"? What about the 49 Muslim people he murdered?
Or was that just an example of one of many kids of dialogue that might be dangerous and need to be proactively censored?
If you were calling for censorship against both far right and far left, sure, I would probably disagree but would concede it was a coherence point of view.
But calling for censorship solely against one side, makes someone by definition a totalitarian.
The nature of online content is that once it's created it can be copied quite easily, if Facebook was able to block 80% of this content that should be commended.
AI is not at the point where we can expect 100% of this content to be removed and if it was there would likely be some collateral damage that others would complain about.
At it's current state we need a lot more humans screening this type of content and who are we to subject other people to that type of mental disturbance?
This seems likely to be an arms race.
But if I am a journalist and I want to get something published it will take at least a few hours to get it through an editor of some kind. FB could do this even just for video. When a user pushes something up it takes a few hours to be published. It would cost FB because some users wouldn't use it without that instant hit.
It takes some time between unique (or in some similarity cluster or whatever they have) content is uploaded, reported and taken down. During this time, exactly same content is not being taken down, because it's not known to be bad. So even if all the content was byte to byte identical, if 20% of it is uploaded before it is reported, there is no chance to have >95% block rate automatically.
Once content is known to be bad, people (and bad actors) will usually stop uploading it (because it no longer works). Also people stop sharing it, because it's no longer possible (and FB delete all instances of such video from the platform anyways). If there is lame script kiddie that does not handle errors, then the number could be 95%, because it would continue with upload attempts. But normal people, or sophisticated actors will respond to errors and stop uploading exactly that video.
1 extreme example: with 1 sophisticated bad actor uploading exactly same video (through some fake/hacked accounts/pages, or whatever), the block rate will always look bad for Facebook: bad actor uploads N videos before being blocked. Once blocked (on video N+1), bad actor will stop. The block rate will be here 1/(N+1), which will be way less 80% (FB's current case) for any N > 0.
What did I try to say? Percentage of what is being blocked does not make sense, since it also depend on how fast is attacker detecting that is being blocked. If fast, the number will always look bad. If attacker does not give a shit, the number will look awesome.
The Zapruder film itself only began to circulate publicly, in a very limited fashion, in 1969, nearly six years later. The first broadcast was in 1970.
People should be able to live their lives largely free of unwanted exposure to this stuff. We shouldn't have to outlaw people who want to investigate it in order to achieve that.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil
From what I recall: Facebook's dilemmas over how/what to censor have existed since very early in the company's history. Internally, FB developed a policy document - separate from the public one we see - which would be applied by both human and AI enforcers. The employment of those human enforcers could be considered unethical in itself (at least without providing adequate therapy). Over time, the secret policy document has grown substantially to account for a lot of edge cases. While terrorist/graphic violence is normally censored, there are provisions for allowing content that would otherwise not be seen/known if not shared on FB (e.g., content that governments seek to cover up). Still, there is considerable internal disagreement among executives at FB when it comes to handling edge cases.
The fact that this secret document (and the processes that define and apply it) has so much power in shaping public perception, politics, etc. with so little transparency is perhaps the most disturbing part of this.
I really don't like when people talk about "censorship in general" when they really mean "This is below my line for what should be censored".
If you want to make the case for no censorship at all then you need to use the most extreme examples of what will be shared and consumed because that's what will happen.
You should go to jail if you do actual crimes, you know, with real victims. Not imaginary victims that don't know when you see a video in the first place.
CP is shared with the intent of reciprocity for more CP; hence sharing existing CP promotes future CP.
Violent/hateful content is shared with the intent to encourage/persuade others to perform similar acts, or to dehumanize the victims.
CP, violent and hateful content are shared for a myriad of reasons, some for profit, like the documentary on the Bataclan attack on Netflix, some for sharing with fellow pedophiles. I don't see why I can't see 9/11 footage because someone else might feel different about it.
No, it should be based on actual research and statistics. For example, many supposedly reasonable people assumed that violent computer games promote criminal/antisocial behaviour, but they actually don’t.
That said, the sharing of the video in that thread is something I think we can all agree is 0’s and 1’s that should be attempted to be prevented.
The media will come and share these videos for clicks and that’s a separate issue. Initially, this guy is knowingly becoming an Internet celebrity for murdering people. This part of the culture has to be addressed. I am worried this kind of meme-heavy killing is opening up a sickening can of worms.
And if the idea is that the public is too dumb and easy to influence and therefore cannot be shown child porn or killings in New Zeland etc then it doesn't make sense at the same time for me to be advertised violent movies in the cinema.
People, generally, watch video of a terrorist attack to be informed about threats to them or their country, a direct first amendment concern.
There is a direct connection between the consumers of child porn and its production that is absent in the other.
How is it that people who become interested in and start to collect CP would ever become involved in its production, in your model? Having gained access to a product they desire, those people seem to follow the same pattern as enthusiasts of any other taste, and develop an interest in creating their own material, as opposed to being satisfied with that already available.
Those same “ones and zeroes” could cost someone their life as much as a mal-designed truss on a bridge could. That is not a new phenomenon.
The same applies to childrens’ safety.
Childrens' safety is not a digital thing in a computer, and AFAIK nothing suggests childrens' safety is more at risk right now than from other forms of violence that seem to be perfectly tolerated and celebrated in books, movies, music.
If I'm trying to make a business out of child porn, sure try to prosecute me. I believe selling other peoples' pictures without consent should be illegal in any case, specially if in demeaning circumstances. If I'm just sharing it, though disgusting it may be, the law should not stick it's nose in it. Just like it's legal to share books on how to make bombs and poison people.
So you're saying that having illegal material on your computer is not a problem because, well, it's "your property"? Like, it's fine for you to have child porn (or pirated software, or illegally downloaded copyrighted music or movies) because hey, it's all zeroes and ones, and you're not "making a business out of it"?
I empathize with the argument of some free speech advocates that it's complicated to find the right balance on where to draw the line in terms of censorship, but frankly the argument that you can do anything you want just because "it's zeroes and ones" and that is not "the real world" is plainly ridiculous. Thankfully what you propose is clearly against the law in most countries.
What separates a simple file host from a complicit active member? I think at that point you're one in the same.
This matter isn't about an isolated machine; it's about a networked machine.
And to the rest of what you've said... I can't do anything but disagree with you.
Yes.
If we empower an elite to censor information or have any other power over us they will use it to further their own agendas even if that means inhibiting the freedom of millions of people.
I really don't like it when people take the few, narrow exceptions to free speech in the US, and try to expand them: https://www.popehat.com/2017/04/18/the-seductive-appeal-of-t...
As in life, our actions should never deprive another of their rights to live and pursue their non infringing rights.you have a right to self, your property, and the efforts of your work. we balance some of the latter in order to provide a more orderly society and benefit those who cannot fully sustain themselves.
A simplistic view I admit but it is when people start having exception after exception we end up with no real liberty but a tyranny of violations. Every thing you do would bound to be covered to where even no action is a wrong.
It's all peer-to-peer and onion routed. The only one who can censor things is the owner although moderators might be able to curate content on their boards (similar to what HN does). Oh, and if the owner throws away his private key then it will keep running just without new updates to the site.
People are afraid of freedom but it all works pretty well in the end.
Also, I agree with the Ayn Rand definition of free speech, i.e. the term censorship only applies to governments. When a company (such as Facebook) censors something they are really just expressing their private property rights.
> If you want to make the case for no censorship at all then you need to use the most extreme examples of what will be shared and consumed because that's what will happen
No free speech advocate worth their salt EVER demanded anything illegal to not be censored, including threats, CP, etc.
Absolutely no one should entrust private corporations with the power to decide what is and isn't extreme, or acceptable speech. Because it will immediately be abused (as is happening right now) to censor speech that companies, mostly based in left leaning blue cities with, overwhelming employee bases leaning towards one ideology (hint: left), to spread their worldview to the REST of the world. US law sets clear definitions on free speech, and is a lot more reliable than the "moral" compass of a few individuals at companies.
For instance, the very legal and harmless "learn to code" meme was only considered offensive by a very small monitory of silicon valley Twitter censors, but anyone who tweeted that got an immediate temporary suspension.
Arrest the shooter, the child porn producer (unless victim==perpetrator), and the person making the threat. It is fine for others to keep and share the video, photos, text, etc.
If it spreads around, then somebody might recognize a perpetrator. I suppose we could get fancy, with a rule that you can keep it if you register it. That would make it far easier to track things back to the source and then see if anybody is getting harmed.
Then how am I able to provide you with data collected by law enforcement authorities demonstrating decade-long trends, along with information on the methodology employed to collect it?
The interesting numbers are how many cases of abuse are hidden from law enforcement because:
1. people won't recognize abusers they know because they won't dare look
2. people would rather destroy a computer than deal with unfriendly police procedures
Oh, BTW, one other problem I didn't mention. The current situation is very easy to use for framing a person. This has been determined to be the case in some divorce cases, and of course an unknown of innocent people were unable to prove that they were framed.
You haven't provided any evidence for your claim about discouraging people from reporting things. I think most police departments have a procedure for dealing with the situation where someone calls to say 'hello I bought an old laptop/hard disk/whatever and it seems to have child porn on it, please advise.'
Waht do you know, there is even an official tipline specially set up for that purpose in the USA: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/report-violations#repo...
By all means continue to explore your imagination unencumbered by facts, but don't be surprised if people who live in the real world end up drawing different conclusions from yourself.
What about the privacy rights of so many kids on album covers? (Nevermind, Virgin Killer, Blind Faith...)
It doesn't seem that society demands such a right.
I also think that this is a stupid argument this footage is not illegal and can be considered by many newsworthy hence should be protected at least in some narrow context.
Child pornography on the other hand is illegal. Broadcasting or displaying child pornography has no newsworthy or any other value in any context other than the pornographic one.
What if we just oppose continuously expanding the types of content that can be censored?
It seems sad to think people need social pressure to be against it, but I’m not sure how else to reconcile people who condemn the spread of one, but defend the other.
You can edit a video to make it appear as safe content and it’s a cat and mouse game because you need humans to annotate those variations before a ML system can detect them (an unsupervised model will likely lead to loads of false positives).
I think the solution is better control over what we see and who we trust enough to allow them to broadcast into our brains.
Now a single tiny state gets to censorship worldwide? How is that not an inflammatory action?
But it would be stupid to duplicate a video for a shared post more than once. A one to many relationship (one video used by multiple shared posts) is more likely.
If that's the case it should be easy to delete the original video, then all of the shares loose their content.
Which is still easy to catch if you hash the video. But doing something like mirroring or otherwise making a small tweak to the video breaks that hash lookup. Hence 20% making it through.
It's like looking for needles in a haystack, and it is expensive.
There is a cost-quality tradeoff with these neural nets as well, but if you go cheap, then your accuracy isn't useful either.
I don't know such a sweet spot exists today where it is both cost effective and useful.
You're assuming at the time that everyone knew it was a terrorist attack, which is false.
Nobody knew that until well after the second plane hit. And even after the third plane crashed into the ground.
The only reason anyone watched TV was because it was a major event with a dramatic incident. Most of the people at the time in my town didn't turn on the TV I had to ask several times at a bar to have the TV turned on. Even then people had no idea what was going on.
But your comment is a non-sequitur regardless- even once we all knew it was a terrorist attack it was replayed endlessly on TV for months, including the people throwing themselves off the building.
I haven't watched any of the footage of the New Zealand attack, but to somehow say it is exceptional to watch the footage is historically speaking, incorrect.
Just because we live in a society nowadays that promotes being weak doesn't mean our base instincts are not there.
To what end? Becoming an informed voter? Don't think so. It's entertainment, just like watching the video. It just sounds less socially acceptable.
- The Police
- The Military
- Journalists
- The people who care to carefully understand a situation before forming a stance
Fixed title: Facebook blocked 80% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos, or 1.5 million of them.
Have you all become so gradually desensitized to violence that absolutely nothing is beyond acceptable?
Are YOU, personally, YOU, happy with how things are in the world?
most of them are 'how dare they try and censor us'.
The matter of whether or not censorship increases or reduces the propensity for attacks like this to happen is a complex and vexed one.
If you see anyone discussing the topic in bad faith, you should flag the comment and report them to the mods, and they will take the appropriate action.
But that would require regulations which is bad for job creations or something.
Yes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But for a high body count, you need a good assault rifle like the AR-15 family, the choice of most mass shooters.
Streaming your mass shooting is fully supported by off the shelf products. GoPro sells an official mount for mounting a camera on a rifle.[1] Video of deer hunting with this.[2] Instructions from GoPro on how to set up your camera for live streaming.[3] It's so easy now that anyone can do it.
And it's all legal in most US states, right up until you pull the trigger. America, Land of Guns!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/GoPro-Sportsman-Mount-Official/dp/B00... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAOTO5ydGbE [3] https://gopro.com/help/articles/block/getting-started-with-l...
And sure, even if we get rid of all the knives, there are still assholes who throw acid at you, but again the scope and severity is reduced. New Zealand had a terrible mass shooting many years ago, and much like Australia restricted access to certain firearms (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramoana_massacre). I expect they’ll further restrict firearms going forward, again like Australia, and while they’ll still have violent incidents they won’t lose 50 lives each time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_New_Zea... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Austral...
Look at what happened after Port Arthur. The worst attacks were vehicular and arson, and still it takes adding many together to add up to one mass shooting. There is a reason why people outside of America don’t act like guns aren’t part of the problem, and an easy part to address. They’re willing to accept the value of harm reduction, because they look at how many were killed and wounded in just Las Vegas, or the nightclub in Orlando, or Aurora. Look at this list! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United...
America lost more people in the last decade alone to mass shootings than NZ lost in all of their massacres with all weapons and in all circumstances (including wartime) since the 1800’s. In a list of the worst mass shootings in history, you have ISIS terrorism in France, Al Qaeda terrorism in Kenya, Anders Breivik in Norway, terrorism again in Kenya, and the next is Las Vegas. The rest of the list is mostly terrorist incidents in Africa and parts of Europe, mixed with a huge number of mass shootings from average citizens in the U.S. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-deadliest-mass-shoot...
Maybe guns aren’t the problem, but some combination of factors is and Americans as a group seem unwilling or unable to confront those reasons effectively. Other nations do, NZ has and will, and they won’t tear each other apart doing it.
Quite directly, this person went somewhere where it would be easier to acquire the guns he used in the attack.
Unlike America, New Zealand is probably going to implement Australian style laws after this.
Is this something GoPro should be ashamed of? 99.99999% of gun owners aren't criminals.
So you're implying that 99.99% of gun owners aren't criminals then?
(In fact, the helmet mounts facilitate live streamed mass murder more than rifle mounts do. Mass murderers often bring along numerous guns and would have to spend time swapping the camera between guns.)
Edit:
Incidentally, those same rifle mounts are for sale in Germany and the UK (and likely many other countries):
https://www.amazon.de/GoPro-Halterung-Schrotflinten-Revolver...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/GoPro-ASGUM-001-Sportsman-Holder-Ca...