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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

When I attended F8, Facebook gave a presentation on how sophisticated their drug post detection had gotten. Things like being able to differentiate between a photo of broccoli tempura and weed (that slide can be seen here: https://www.cnet.com/news/marijuana-or-broccoli-facebook-ill...), "candy" being sold at unusual prices, factoring in how networks of people interact with the posts, etc. were highlighted that appeared highly sophisticated, to the point where some examples took hints for the humans in the room to figure out the right answer.

Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag. I'm dubious that that's the best they can do.

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I think this is the (American) white privilege bubble at work, in a different way than usual. Drug use is pervasive in American society, everyone knows this and it's an obvious thing for Facebook to police. Same with violence, racist abuse, and pornographic images. Buying and selling domestic workers, on the other hand, is so far removed from our experience that it's not something that I would have even thought to work on. I know human trafficking happens, in the abstract sense that I read about it in The Economist or The Atlantic magazines, but the idea that people would take advantage of social media platforms to do it still blows my mind.

What blows my mind about what you're describing is how ill-equipped society was for Facebook, and how laughable it is that Mark Zuckerberg is in charge of reconciling Facebook and society, for the very reasons you're talking about.

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.

You could simply replace "Facebook" with "the Internet", or just "electronic communication networks". If our reaction to every new technological advance is either 1) "let's wait until society is ready for it", or 2) "this should be strictly controlled by the government", we'd still be banging rocks together to make fire.

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.

Can you tell us who you know that will be best in charge to run it. Give us 3 names.

Maybe no one should have that level of power.

Can you just make your point please

That is his point. Who is qualified? It'd probably have to be many people, but then who are they accountable to? Is it really better to have Facebook be government run? I highly doubt it.

I don't know the answer and won't bore you by trying to make one up on the fly. I'll just say this is a novel challenge to human society and requires a novel approach to corporate governance & accountability. What we're doing now isn't working and the stakes are as high as they can be.

We have the responsibility to insist on better from our institutions.

Just realized I can't tell the difference between cannabis and broccoli tempura.

> Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag

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.

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