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Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have the ability to control your premises, or employ enough security, perhaps you should not be permitted to operate those premises. Unsafe clubs get closed down.

They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist. If societies around the world conclude they do more harm than good as they currently operate, it's perfectly reasonable to require them to moderate adequately. If they cannot they can close, or withdraw from that region, and someone else may wish to try. Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit. Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far, looks like it's not going to be tenable for much longer.

Not only am I fine with that, I think it long overdue.

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If you don't have the ability to control your premises, or employ enough security, perhaps you should not be permitted to operate those premises.

So we should shut down the mosques in New Zealand because they didn't control their premises and keep the shooter out? Should we shut down banks because they didn't have enough security to keep a bank robber out? You are shifting the blame away from the perpetrator. Every crime ever could be blamed on the victim for lack of security.

Let's take it to the absurd. I am NOT shifting any blame from the perpetrator.

I am placing additional blame on a medium that isn't willing to exercise adequate restraint or control.

A bank undoubtedly has security measures in place to prevent robbery, if they don't bother, they won't last long. Nonetheless, there are regulations on what may and may not be done for public spaces, how crowded they may be to pass fire regulation and so forth. Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.

> Neither a mosque nor bank should be closed for a circumstance that could not reasonably have been predicted.

How is this any different from Facebook? A bank has security measures in place to prevent robbery, but a robbery could still take place in one and is more likely to occur in one because it's a high value target. Facebook has human and AI moderation in place that automatically processes anything you upload. Users are also able to report content. However, just like sometimes banks are robbed, sometimes objectionable content slips through their filters. By your own logic Facebook shouldn't be closed down because mass shootings cannot be reasonably predicted. The basis for your argument is fundamentally flawed and if you extrapolate it to your own examples you'll quickly see how ridiculous and illogical it is.

It isn't - if they were not providing a broadcast platform. The local bank branch broadcasts nada, if they do somehow broadcast your financial info they can be prosecuted for failing their duty of care, and you'll be eligible for compensation even without prosecution.

Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit have size and reach enough that turning a blind eye is no longer credible. We've seen countless issues crop up with regard to elections, election advertising, hate speech, and in this case broadcasting a slaughter. All of which serve to demonstrate they are unwilling to self-regulate taking them into territory where it's clear current regulation is not adequate.

Calling for adequate regulation to require moderation and oversight, and to require a duty of care to their users, viewers and listeners is not calling for them to be closed down. That comes if they prove unwilling to obey said regulation, as does any of the other measures brought to bear against habitual law breakers - fines, asset seizure, blocking etc. Regulation that will vary between different countries as they will choose differing limits.

Sometimes? I think the repeated uploads from the Christchurch video showed that their AI is not working.

> How is this any different from Facebook?

Primarily because we’ve been telling them they need to do a better job about this for years, so “could not reasonably have been predicted“ absolutely does not apply. They have literally been condemned by a United Nations investigator for what happened in Myanmar [1]. Multiple government have been unhappy with their attitude problem [2]. In this report, one of the problems is they “continue to host and publish the mosque attack video”, which they absolutely don’t have any excuse for not being aware of, not any more.

If this is the best that the state of the art can manage, then the state of the art is not good enough for Facebook to continue to exist. If Facebook were a human, it would have been fired for gross negligence.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/13/myanmar-u...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/31/uk-and-ca...

We can apply the same argument to governments with their lack of censorship of bad words as people walk the streets. We don't because it's ridiculous on it's face, and we don't want a blatant surveillance society such as that.

adequate restraint or control is a subjective impression most users probably do not agree with.

Those other businesses aren't running 40% profit margins.

It's a fair question to ask, "If a company is that profitable and having toxic effects, then why shouldn't it pay some of the cost of addressing its toxic effects?"

The tendency on HN is to say exploitive governments want to tax technology startups.

But we're not talking about technology startups. We're talking about the new old-old ATT.

> "If a company is that profitable and having toxic effects, then why shouldn't it pay some of the cost of addressing its toxic effects?"

cf oil or chemical companies polluting via spills, etc.

I would argue that unlike your examples — the bank that got robbed; the mosque that got shot up — Facebook perpetrated and facilitated the crime.

A better question would be, should a bank be held liable after being robbed if it failed its duties by designing cheap systems to save money — yes. Should a mosque/church be held liable if they received a threat and they ignored causing large loss of life — yes.

Facebook is culpable. They know the kind of garbage that floats in their platform. They continue to develop their platform and they continue to improve their ad systems. Why won’t they dedicate as much engineering effort to gain an advantage on racism/hate speech/fascism? I’ll tell you why.

Because Zuckerberg simply does not care. He owns the platform that dominates information flows and public discourse. Why would he undermine that?

Well as much as HN or the news media would like you to believe, societies around the world have definitely not concluded that FB does more harm than good and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You may think the club is unsafe, but a billion people are still attending all night and they feel perfectly comfortable.

Attendance proves nothing at all. We've no idea if they are comfortable or not. Many appear to have come to think of it as a necessary evil.

Millions of people were eating adulterated food every meal prior to food regulations. Political process and advertising was rife with corruption prior to attempts to instil a semblance of fairness limiting what was allowed and when. Yet people attempted to vote before this.

You're claiming simultaneously that we have no idea whether these users are comfortable or not and that most of them think of it as a necessary evil.

Attendance absolutely proves something when it comes to social media. You can't make a comparison between social media and food because one is necessary for survival and one isn't (I'm sure I'm going to invite a ton of comments here on how 'Facebook has become so ubiquitous and powerful it's now synonymous with survival!') If the negatives really outweighed the positives people would be leaving Facebook by the droves. It's only on HN and in the news media that this narrative is being spun.

OK, definitely can't take you seriously now.

I am claiming your statement "and they feel perfectly comfortable" is unknown. Further that it is highly unlikely.

Many is not most - it probably is most of my friends and relatives, but they are representative of nothing at all. Yet there is now a certain discomfort in almost all discussions of Facebook - no matter where that takes place - that simply was not there 5 or so years ago.

>Attendance absolutely proves something when it comes to social media.

Yes, it proves that network effects can force people into bad equilibra. If you think high university costs are harmful for society in the long run, but if you personally don't attend you will incur significant cost in the short run, with nobody cooperating, how do you behave?

> Attendance absolutely proves something when it comes to social media.

Not really - I would love to be able to delete my account from Facebook but it's the only place some people that I want to keep in touch with will use.

(I did the next best thing - deleted the apps and only check the website infrequently.)

It doesn't actually matter whether people are "comfortable" on Facebook or not, it matters whether they're being incited to murder people. Facebook has an effect outside its users. The Bhopal of racism.

Exactly. Generally speaking, the onus is on the userbase to react to perceived (or real) immorality by refraining from using Facebook.

However, it remains the office of government to introduce enforceable regulation in this (or any) space to protect their constituents, and hold those in violation accountable. I don't suspect it's an easy task, as the problems are broad and can be a grey area. I.e, some of the problems with Facebook stem from mischievous users -- exactly how accountable the platform is for their behavior isn't universally agreed upon.

I think if rules of engagement happen, people will have less problems with just letting the market decide.

What's the internet version of the fire marshall? If the people that feel the club is unsafe, a simple call to the authorities will have the marshall come out and declare it unsafe and shut it down. Can we get Fire Marshall Bill to do it?

The presence of a lot of people doesn't tell you whether it's safe, only how many people are at risk if a fire does start. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire

>> Facebook could employ thousands more to moderate and supervise - without destroying their ability to make profit

You're underestimating the scale of this problem.

Facebook users create billions of new posts a day. And, tens of millions of these posts get reported for moderation per day.

"Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.

>> Pretending the problems don't exist, as all the platforms have done so far

You must be joking. Facebook has already made massive investments into moderation. It's their top priority for 2019. In many ways, they are doing the opposite of pretending this problem doesn't exist.

>> They - or any other social media company - don't have a right to exist.

Nobody is arguing that FB has an inherent right to exist. The only point GP made was that (as made evident by your comment) many people are underestimating the associated costs with manual moderation of content.

> "Thousands of more" employees isn't going to solve the problem. Assuming each posts takes 10 minutes of labor to review, you would need an army of 200K individuals, and this amount of labor would cost many billions of dollars per year.

Agreed. Let’s require them to do that.

Should all online platforms be required to do that? I can post here on HN right now and no moderator is pre-approving my content.

I could go find the shooter’s illegal manifesto and post it here, I might be banned after some period of time but just like on Facebook it would have had time for other people to see it.

Applied consistently this standard would kill most online forums and that type of thing.

It’s a matter of scale. Even before they became larger than the largest single nation on Earth, Facebook used to get in the news for stories like “1000 people show up to birthday party after teen accidentally forgets privacy settings”. Hacker News can #ahem# slashdot servers it links to, so it’s not exactly small, but it’s still peanuts compared to Facebook.

Just as software engineering practices need to change for the big names compared to everyone else, so do social practices.

So why not fault the ISPs for allowing this?

If you host a hateful or illegal website and someone complains to your ISP they’ll cut you off immediately.

No reason Shitbook shouldn’t be held to the same standard.

They do the same thing. They worked all night to prevent the video from propagating. What they are calling for here is preventing it from being published. So this would require your ISP to prevent the content before people complain.

> The question then becomes who decides what's acceptable content, the only answer is regulations and legislation for this otherwise for-profit tech giants will be the ones who decide and they're more concerned with user-engagement than far reaching detached societal implications.

What about this : all content is potential knowledge and should be made available. That way no one get to decide what is "acceptable content". At the end of the day, the laws still forbid anyone to kill people, content or not.

A good read is : https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2018...

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