Slave markets found on Instagram and other apps
bbc.com
bbc.com
Please take careful note: If you do not do proper risk analysis of your platform you WILL be used to perpetrate crime and if you find that you did not do what you could have done to stop it you may end up being an accessory to that crime. More so if you ignore warnings or flags by other users of the platform. This goes for anything that allows the uploading and further distribution of user generated content (especially 1-1) and for anything that deals with money.
Your nifty platform or weekend project could easily become the vehicle for someone else's crimes.
edit: oh no.
But no, I think for the most part it was pretty benign. It looks like they were planning on doing some kind of maybe SEO gaming or something using my de.licio.us clone I made almost a decade ago. I had about 23,000 accounts with .ru and .lv email addresses, many repeats, almost none of which interacted with the app at all.
Many recently created, even today. I think there must be a script that loads in users or something like that.
For example, What if you sell someone some pencils and they stab someone to death with them?
If I run a forum about gardening and someone is using the PMs as a slave market, am I responsible for not monitoring every single message on the platform, and should I be?
What if I own an office and I rent it out for people to have meetings, and they meet there in person and hold a slave market, am I also supposed to be monitoring their in-person meetings?
2. If someone asks where to draw the line along the sequence of a|b|c|d that does not mean they cannot tell these apart, it means they are pondering which of these are ok and which are not. Distinguishing things and bucketing things are not the same activity.
As for (2). It's simple: there is the law and there is ethics. Anything illegal you should work hard to stop and collaborate with LE to get it stamped out on your properties. Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Ethics come at a cost.
2) Anything unethical is up to you where you draw the line. Seriously? You do not think one should be discussing boundary of ethicals choices with one's peers? Please explain.
[a] Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Sorry, but you're the one not assuming good faith to begin with.
These problem would be the same if you had a hot dog stand and customers reported to you a child prostitution ring massively buying your hot dogs for the kids. What would you do ?
If you are the property owner, taking care that the people on your property is safe.
As a steward of the land that’s your job. By purchasing the land you are saying: no one else has title to watch over the people on this land, only I do.
So yes, you then have a responsibility to do so.
I'm wondering if machine learning could be used for this.
We might as well all pack up and go home then. God forbid some group coordinates an atrocity using the comments section of our blog, for want of proper risk analysis.
Best leave it all to the oligarchs. They know what they're doing. They'll look after us.
The thing with weekend projects is: they tend to lie around unused and unchecked. If you are aware of this, people can mitigate it by adding propper monitoring etc.
And what is an acceptable, reasonable solution? Even FB with their near-infinite resources gets in trouble all the time for illegal content and they still spread all kinds of it. Is the only possible solution to be a big corporation?
Ethics in CS is important just like any other field. I think just taking a class to be aware of it helps a lot.
Since we're talking about image hosters (I built one some years ago): how do you solve the dilemma that a) you can be sure that at some point somebody will upload images that are illegal to host and look at, b) in order to identify and remove them you'll have to look at them or pay someone to look at them.
What we did (before ML became widely available/easily usable, not sure if there are ready-to-use models for filtering all illegal images out there these days - nobody would want to train one themselves using illegal content...) was to look at access logs and remove all images that had suspicious hostnames in the "Referer" header. It wasn't enough apparently, it got my successor into trouble and a new dilemma (take down the platform immediately, or operate it as a honeypot to help authorities who asked for it, potentially incriminating themselves for not taking down illegal content after being made aware of it... [police can't give you a carte blanche for operating a honeypot, a DA/prosecutor can still prosecute]).
Edit: it doesn't seem to be available for my country, but a service like https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-... might help nowadays.
I imagine that if you happen across it while moderating then you won't really know what you'll find, because you're relying on reports or random browsing to find offending content. That is, as long as you're following reasonable procedures for moderating then that should be good enough, no?
Clean the building.
I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner - no normal person would risk doing it if they faced 10-20 years imprisonment for human trafficking. Simply pass a law that all domestic workers have to report to a police station for 5 minutes every Sunday, alone, during which time they will be asked if they are being held against their will. This would likely eliminate the vast majority of human trafficking currently happening over there. It blows my mind that the government is doing so little about something so abhorrent.
"Ok, we have a target that we need to suicide"
Romanians in slave-like conditions on Italian farms, African refugees and economic migrants enslaved in North Africa and Spain, Mexicans and trafficked people in slave conditions across the US, forced prostitution in America, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, ... - of locals and foreigners alike. I've heard thanks to the refugee influx you can get a prostitute in Athens for 10€. And all this nightmare is not even counting all the 'arranged marriages' between 12 year old girls and 62 year old 'husbands'.
This is a human problem, and one that far too few resources are spent on. Child abuse gets much attention but factually still too few resources (ask the 9 year old Filipina prostituting herself on Skype - although probably she's still better off than her neighbour trafficked to Thailand). But beyond this, even in what you would consider the most developed countries, you still find slaves. Because neighbours don't notice or care. Because the police is understaffed or doesn't care. Because even when they are saved there are no resources to truly save them.
We all close our eyes and ignore these crimes when they happen in broad daylight. If you are anywhere in a big city ANYWHERE there's a good chance you're not far from a slave. We ignore the rampant poverty that leads to all this. We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.
'Frre the Slaves' estimates that, in absolute numbers, there are more slaves today in the world than at any point in history.
Don't ask me how to resolve this. I just know that somehow we are all complicit.
Another take on this is that, by making uncontrolled immigration illegal, we make the potential immigrants think twice before coming here and potentially becoming a slave etc.
That doesn’t sound like the a law that is intended to prevent slavery like conditions for domestic workers. And very much encourage abuse in general and confiscating passports specifically (can’t leave the country without the sponsor’s permission sounds like a pretty implied permission to take someone’s passport).
Unlike this where the worker cannot go back home.
>>>I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner
Your second paragraph's question is answered in your own first paragraph. The power structure in the country isn't going to undermine a system that it directly benefits from. Especially given the culture in that part of the world, that has a very non-Western perspective on things like "submission" and "human rights"....
Of course we don't want social media enabling that. But the bad guys are the people who are keeping others as slaves, and the law enforcement that turn a blind eye. The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked. A single dev could mock up a replacement, "like craigslist, but for slaves".
Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery?
Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this.
But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.
The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?
The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.
Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.
I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.
https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-...
With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.
The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.
You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it!
The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.
The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them.
The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody.
Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.
Would that be entrapment? Catch a predatoresque?
For example, if you are an undercover cop and pressure a random taxi driver to be your getaway driver for a robbery, it would be entrapment. If you just host a honeypot website, post links to it in a few shady places, and people end up using it to do illegal things out of their own volition, it wouldn't count as entrapment.
Eliding that it not only "enables" it in a binary way, but also "enables" it in a that creates exponential reach and growth of the market. This explosive mechanic is one of the things implies by the phrase, "tech boom." Your response reduces social media's role to a one-sentence hand-wave.
> The solution isn't to take down the posts, but to alert law enforcement.
Is your point that you can't do the latter if you do the former? Because that's not the case in any way.
> These governments should be urged to find and arrest the people who are doing this, otherwise it won't stop even if blocked.
You're _technically_ right in the very narrow sense that there will likely still be some kind of market for chattel slavery even without Instagram. But again you are minimizing Instagram's (I'm using Instagram as a stand-in for all the companies involved) role and responsibilities in this situation for some reason.
When we talk about these companies we use phrasing like, "huge tech platforms," "tech giants," etc. To my mind you are defending these "tech behemoths" from the very idea of public accountability.
The response to the question you raise of government & law enforcement enforcing the law is so obvious it barely merits response, but: yes, obviously the government should govern and law enforcement should enforce the law. Bringing it up at all seems to me like another deflection away from "Instagram"'s responsibilities in governance on & public accountability for their platforms.
I agree but on the other hand they should play an active role. Not an expert on this one, but speaking about hate related posts on Facebook, they did turn a blind eye on that. That makes me think they don't care about < 1% content that might be a problem.
If they don't play an active role, they are facilitators. Probably in most jurisdictions this makes people guilty as well.
Moreover it gives law&order proponents arguments to just watch literally everyone. And in any case the law enforcements get only aware of a small percentage of crimes happening. Basically they are no more than a crutch to mend torn fabrics of society.
Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag. I'm dubious that that's the best they can do.
When I think about the global scale and social/political/economic scope required to responsibly run Facebook, and compare that to the skill set of Mark Zuckerberg it's just, like, insane that he's in charge of it. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is truly brilliant and capable of becoming a great international leader. No doubt. I just don't think it should be, like, his first job. Lol. It's truly absurd.
We have the responsibility to insist on better from our institutions.
Zuckerberg is certainly ill-equipped for this. So is every other person on the planet, but at least Zuckerberg has enormous financial and public relations incentives to figure it out. I do not envy his job.
Their only announced action. It would be nice to know more, but it's really common to not announce your strategy so people can't easily avoid it. I hope they're doing more and it's just not public.
If the same goes for the communication tools, maybe we should regulate them too? Software is like the wild west when it comes to regulations and unfortunately, regulations will come because the software developers fail spectacularly to regulate themselves.
Does your software act as a perfect tool for genocide or a decline in the health of a society? You won't be able to stand with straight face counting your money saying "not my problem" simply because a business is supposed to create more value than it takes from the system and if the opposite happens the system will eject that business. Commies will take over, something will happen before people die off for the ideal of the free enterprise. That's why we don't have free organ market.
Anyway, this doesn't mean that Instagram or any other app makers are evil, it simply means that there's a problem that their business enables and some people are asking questions.I hope they don't say "not my problem" because that's how revolts begin, commies take over or guillotines become street attraction.
Social platforms are given a hard time for being walled gardens, but they are clearly getting to a kind of scale where they are hard to police, almost like the internet at large. If they weren't owned by a single company maybe this would be seen differently?
Actually, yes - you’ll have a hard time obtaining SIM cards to use your cell phone without giving ID, precisely for this reason.
Seriously, hardware is regulated. Check it out.
It's all about response to some kind of abuse and it's different everywhere. In some places regulators mandate that the alcohol bottles must have special plugs that let out alcohol but cannot be re-filled easily because at some point someone started bootleg alcohol business by re-filling the consumed bottles.
Different places have different problems enabled through different technologies or goods, therefore different regulations. The place is huge and devided to about 200 parcels all with different approach of handling issues, check it out here: https://www.google.com/maps
Instagram obviously can't single-handedly prevent things like slavery, but they can absolutely police their platform to try to stop it.
If you're leasing out equipment, you better have reasonable tracking/prevention mechanisms of your equipment. This is much like tracking car leases, computer leases, apartment leases.
2. Go rob a bank with it.
3. The rental car company is liable?
According to this logic, if you checkout a book from the library, hit someone on the head with it, then the library is liable....
Society will stop functioning in this case. Google would have to start requiring background checks to open a gmail account...
If FB/Instagram was: 1. Actively promoting that illegal activity, or 2. Turning an blind eye / not removing posts that are clearly doing illegal stuff, then they might be liable...
The point is that there are hundreds of millions of accounts in FB/Instagram, and it is almost impossible to monitor everything that goes on it.....
3. The rental car company is liable?
No. The rental car company should
1. Do driver record check 2. Contain enough info about drivers to aid law enforcement
I believe it is faster to sign up for an instagram account than getting a rental car.
Social media cannot prevent everything. On the other end of the spectrum, they can't just brush themselves off of the responsibility either. This is simply, to protect children and vulnerable.
They need to be ok with losing fake users, bots and illicit activity accounts from their MAU counts.
These workers origin countries also share the blame, they refuse to help them. In many cases they turn a blind eye to this slavery since these enslaved workers send currency to their origin country.
The embassy will then confirm your identity (there are various ways).
There are girls that were raped being publicly lashed for having sex or in some cases even for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Easy to draw scenarios to keep them.
Or the typical Eastern European or African slave: they get a simple message: "if you complain we kill your little sister (or send her over to take your place!!)".
Just Google "خادمات للتنازل" and you will find these ads on Twitter, Pintrest and lots of dedicated sites. :(
Now I agree that the problem can’t be 100% eliminated as at least some of it happens behind closed doors, but it would sure reduce the scale of this business if Shitbook & co weren’t around to provide a free platform for trading slaves in the open.
They should be prosecuted for complicity and not be allowed to hide behind the excuse of the “algorithm”. If your algorithm isn’t good enough to filter out this behaviour then go back to the drawing board and find a better solution. Human moderation works pretty well on forums. Oh it doesn’t scale? Well that’s a shame but it’s not a right to be profitable - if you can’t figure out a sustainable business model then don’t be in business. It’s like starting a very cheap rental car business and stealing cars for your inventory because you can’t actually afford to buy them...
But it seems to me that accusing Apple/FB/Instagram that those platforms were used for it is exactly the same as accusing Toyota/Nissan/Ford that vehicles they made were used for transporting slaves.
Facebook/Apple/Instagram capture insane amounts of data from their users in exchange for various services. Those services are being used for human trafficking. It behooves these companies to regulate these practices.
That ought to end the pervasive monitoring of users for marketing purposes.
The system in the gulf has been there for decades. If you weren't outraged five years ago - no reason to be now. If you were - keep the fire burning and try to do something.
As long as the system for abuse is in place, people will communicate with smoke signals if needed to facilitate the involuntarily employment change.
So, less efficiently?
That's probably a net benefit. Even when you can't eliminate a problem, making it less frequent is a win.
A phpbb board will do just fine and as efficient.