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Comment by mchusma | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why doesn't Facebook just: -Allow all posts -Allow users to customize what they want to see (e.g. "dont show me posts that glorify violence" or "only allow covid posts that match WHO guidelines" or "allow exceptions from political figures or of historical significance") and allow users to ban hide posts that are found untruthful by third parties (snopes, etc).

To me effectively everyone wins. Facebook users who want to curate their experience can do so. Facebook gets out of the censorship business so governments can lay off. Governments will have a hard time objecting because it is the users controlling their information, not the company. "Sources of truth" have to compete to get the customer's business.

Its hard but not that hard, and its Facebook's core business.

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Defaults are important because, fundamentally, misinformation and superstition spread faster, farther and stronger than the truth, with much more staying power.

There's also the practical problem with social networks - within a degree or two of connections, you'll at least have some people who are part of communities covered by your own blocks. But it is in Facebook's interests to show you those communities and extend those linkages; likewise, people would simultaneously object to 1) Facebook not showing them content from friends even if it violates their own content settings 2) Facebook violations their content settings.

It would be a lose/lose situation. It is now, too.

They could then no more wash their hands of it than they can now: if people are using your platform to do bad things, or things society rejects, then you'll take the blame nomatter what level (or lack thereof) of interference you take.

> Defaults are important because, fundamentally, misinformation and superstition spread faster, farther and stronger than the truth, with much more staying power.

The amount of effort involved in telling a lie is pretty low. Going out to do good research to tell the truth is often much more expensive in terms of effort.

Or, said another way:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Yes defaults matter, and people will campaign heavily for the default settings, but perfect can't be the enemy of good and I can't see how this is worse.

I think its not only possible but relatively easy to have user settings that allow people to toggle on/off "1) Facebook not showing them content from friends even if it violates their own content settings".

Ah, that word "just." Whenever I see "just" in some kind of kind of technical demand in the first line, I immediately know that there's a lot of stuff to unpack.

Here, you have requested something fairly close to a general AI which understands both written language, images, and even more fun, images of language. Cartoon violence right on down to "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" And will quoting Henry II of England set off your detector?

Let's unpack your COVID post thing -- note that WHO guidelines have changed a few times. Recall that era wherein they said that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Also, don't buy masks. So you'd have to factor in a time domain as the guidelines change, in addition to your generalized AI as above.

In IT, I have frequently heard requests for "why can't we just get the things we know we will like?" and such. It all boils down to that mind-reading, future-predicting generalized AI.

Why don't we just turn it on?

Couldn't agree more. Also the implication that users will manage or update settings to their preferences is incredible in its own right.

So, let's just do it.

Okay, but companies like Google, FB, and Twitter are already putting great efforts towards implementing that type of thing in production.

Whats so difficult about letting a user toggle those existing filters on and off? Or allowing users more control over their news feed, such as allowing it to be chronological? Or hiding items based on keywords?

Its our job as technologists to not only tell people if/when their request is technologically impractical/impossible, but more importantly, to make informed recommendations of what is technically feasible and most closely matches their intended goals (which they might not yet even fully understand themselves).

banads says>"Whats so difficult about letting a user toggle those existing filters on and off? Or allowing users more control over their news feed, such as allowing it to be chronological? Or hiding items based on keywords?"<

This! And...

allow 3rd-party individuals/companies to create user-filters that users could load up at their preference. Allow a proliferation of filters to compete.

So, say, if you don't want profanity you could view FaceBook with the, say, "FaceBook-no-profanity" filter active. Or if you don't want antisemitic remarks you can load up FaceBook with, say, the no-antisemitic filter. Filters could be loaded, unloaded, switched on and off at the users desire.

So everyone could see the Internet they want or, at any time, view everything or part of it. And if you want to see what a friend is talking about, you could load the filter(s) (s)he is using. Sets of filters could be grouped, e.g., TomT's filters, Mary's filters, Mom's filters, etc., so you can, so to speak, "see the (Internet) world through their eyes".

I see where this is going...in the long run the Internet will turn into a vast wasteland with gardens of little consequence and minimal membership. It will become defunct and all else will be simple P2P over TCP/IP.

Eh, I haven't seen it in production.

I hate seeing politics of any stripe in my news feed, for example. I get enough of it elsewhere. But how can Facebook take an image, recognize that it is a cartoon, and that the cartoon is based on something political? We're not there yet. We're not anywhere near there yet.

You and I, as humans in this time period, will likely recognize a drawing of a man with kind of mocha-y skin, ears that stick straight out, large-ish front teeth, and kind of a squint as a standard issue caricature of a particular former President of the USA. We can immediately go "aha, politics!"

So I suppose we could try to train some AIs on a historical set of caricatures of politically-relevant figures. Of course, caricaturists and cartoonists of all stripes are called upon to produce new stylized exaggerations of people as they step into the limelight (or are dragged into it), so our training set must be updated on a daily basis. Hrm, some more work there ...

But then it gets into "politics you would like to hear" versus "politics you would NOT like to hear," and that is just going to be something that will require a mental model of what you do and do not like.

Right now, Amazon and Netflix cannot get my recommendations even CLOSE and their data is much better curated than what someone might type into a Facebook text box.

Chronological? Reasonable! Probably doable. Keywords? Who is putting those in? Who is curating that set of keywords?

They already have processes in place to flag and remove covid information and violent content, so you obviously don't need general AI.

Yes thank you. My examples were explicitly things that they already do in production. They were not random examples.

Ah that word 'ah'. Whenever I see 'ah' at the start of a post, I expect condescension to follow.

In IT I infrequently hear anyone say IT.

Facebook doesn't have anything more that the dream of a promise that some day they'll have AI smart enough to curate content as well as humans can. They don't even have a hope of doing so in a way that all humans can agree is fair.

They are criminally negligent in allowing themselves to be what they are: a publishing platform designed to divide humanity into smaller and smaller subgroups in order to ease marketing, without regard to public safety or any conception of common good. Social media does not care about the blood it spills.

Want the good old web back? Enforce responsibility for content published on the publisher. Let's see facebook moderate every post. Let hateful shitheads find a place to host them, and let them start their own blogs, with their identifiable information publicly available. Failing that, maybe we can do something like this idea I posted this morning. (https://www.reddit.com/r/socialmedia/comments/gwhiie/trust_a...)

My bet is most people would not realize this was available and would continue to see whatever the default options were. And so you get back to square one, what should the defaults be?

That is not square one, its a far better place than where we are now.

Of course. That is exactly what FB should be doing and its likely where Twitter is going as well. Nothing else is sustainable. What exactly gives a bunch of 20 to 30 year old privileged nerds the moral authority or wisdom to decide what information the country gets access to? Pardon my French, but fuck that.

Silicon Valley people live in a bubble where everyone they know is smart and liberal. After a while they forget that there exist smart people who are not liberal and implicitly think that if someone disagrees with them, they are uneducated and just wrong. Consequently they take it upon themselves to demand that people not be allowed to say incorrect and uneducated opinions (really just anything the Silicon Valley hivemind disagrees with).

When nearly everyone in your bubble has the same beliefs on politics and culture you will react violently towards threatening ideas.

It's not about users being outraged about what they can read.

"Those other people are idiots and will kill us all without some rules" is a basic human conceit. These people calling for censorship on Facebook don't want to see that stuff, sure, but way more importantly they want FB to censor so that other people CAN'T read that stuff.

They think that if they shout loud enough, they will get to decide what other, more gullible/radicalized/violent/whatever people are allowed to read.

It's really condescending nonsense to claim that you know better than another adult what they should be allowed to read.

Lots of really famous/successful people are thinking along these lines lately. It's quite popular amongst the "thought leadership" set to think that Facebook has some moral obligation to play publishing cop and shut down private groups where people say things they don't like, because people other than the ones calling for censorship are so gullible and malleable and childlike that they'll turn into a terrorist if they read enough about 5G or vaccines or antifa or whatever in private FB groups or something.

A handy example is John Gruber's recent post on the matter:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/02/schnitt-faceboo...

The correct answer to people being wrong is education, never censorship.

I defer, as always, to Heinlein:

> “Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.”

> they want FB to censor so that other people CAN'T read that stuff

I'm having a hard time believing that they want to stop with Facebook, either. I suspect this will move on to hosting providers next.

There was an effort by Anonymous people to negatively affect Cloudflare in some capacity called #OpISIS due to the fact that Cloudflare generally tries to be a content-neutral pipe, and was continuing to host websites used by the Islamic State.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/19/cloudflar...

I wish there were more companies like Cloudflare.

> Cloudflare generally tries to be a content-neutral pipe

They did a complete 180 over the past couple of years, for particularly distasteful content (in their opinion). For better or worse.

>The correct answer to people being wrong is education, never censorship.

What do you do when people reject education itself as a matter of course or principle?

Or can only view such attempts defensively, see them as patronizing at best, and so radicalize further as a result?

Heck, even "this post is misleading" approaches, which leave the original content intact, are seen by some as a form of censorship (and definitely as propaganda to be discarded) and I don't think that's an unreasonable response based on their existing point of view.

Fundamentally, if misinformation is more appealing and attractive than truths, how far can educational approaches go? If it's information junk food, then I see education helping no more than it helps for the obesity crisis - perhaps less so because that unhealthiness actually feels bad and prompts action. There's no equivalent with disinfo.

> What do you do when people reject education itself as a matter of course or principle?

Shrug. Sometimes the wrong choices of others can't be helped.

> Fundamentally, if misinformation is more appealing and attractive than truths, how far can educational approaches go?

Well, based on approximately the last 1000 years of history, considering that we have an orbiting science lab 400km above the Earth and outdated superstitions seem to be waning worldwide, I would venture a preliminary guess that in the long run, truth will win out.

All of the other times we tried mass censorship, it ended very poorly, with millions upon millions of deaths.

Trust in your fellow human beings. You can't have a society without trust. Most people are not malicious, nor are they exceedingly dumb. Let people read.

If you're worried about people not knowing the things they need to know, or being mislead by wrong or bad information, I encourage you to write a book, or make a website. Hell, I'll even help you set it up, for free, if you need assistance doing so.

Thanks for the follow up.

I agree that people want to adjust what other people can read, but this is where Facebook can really sidestep this by making things user preferences. Because it sounds strange to campaign to force Facebook to "override a person's explicit preferences about what to show/hide".

> don't show me posts that glorify violence

Does this include "We killed Osama Bin Laden" [perhaps with some details and photos of the operation]?

One thing I have to hand it to Twitter for is that they wrote an explicit carve out for their "no glorifying violence" rules to militaries and governments.

This seems to be somewhat implicit in our society ("violence is bad, unless it's our heroes doing it to people another color far away, then woohoo bombs away!") but usually unsaid and unexamined. It's a good moral move by Twitter to point out the contradiction.

A better move would have been for them to simply ban everyone calling for violence, militaries included (if and only if they are going to be banning people selectively based on content, which they are, which I think is bad).

https://www.cnet.com/news/twitters-new-abuse-enforcement-vio...

> Its hard but not that hard

That depends on how you define "it." Media is not neutral. At least, we haven't yet had a neutral mass media. In 2020 that means defaults, recomendation engines & such. These are core to FB's product, business model. They're not neutral.

You need to take the scale FB's influence into account. Elections, revolutions, mass protests, primary political narratives... all determined on FB. What happens on Facebook can determine presidencies and prime ministerships. The have more power than Rupert Murdoch. At this scale you can't just "get out of the censorship business."

Youtube, for comparison, appears to be trying to get out of the harder problems by exiting the space entirely. On hard news issues, they're defaulting to (more than defaulting to) television news sources. I don't think they want politics on their platform anymore. It's too dangerous.

FB can't do that as easily, but I expect they'll try something similar.

Basically... social media will try to hand the problem back to traditional media somehow.

I agree. But this would reduce engagement and therefore profits. Do you see FB opting in to reducing profits?

I'm not so convinced it would reduce engagement. I would think that me giving Facebook feedback on what I want would potentially increase engagement. But it feels more sustainable to me, and less prone to unwanted regulation.

In fact, if I were Facebook and wanting to reduce competition, I would try to pass legislation that requires these kinds of controls, making it harder for upstarts.

> I don't understand why doesn't Facebook just: -Allow all posts [...] To me effectively everyone wins.

"Everyone", including racists, terrorists, drug cartels, human smugglers, child pornographers, scammers, phishers, hackers, gun nuts, anarchists...

I know you say you'd be fine with all that stuff, but if I write long enough I'll find something you're not OK with. And everyone else has a different something. Finding common ground on which we can all agree isn't a mistaken goal or an unnatural side effect of having a public forum. It is the purpose of having a public forum.

This is just another variant of the "forums should be unmoderated" argument. No one wants that. And the proof? You're making the point on a heavily moderated forum.

>No one wants that. And the proof? You're making the point on a heavily moderated forum.

That's terrible argument. HN already works pretty close to what mchusma proposes. See "showdead" option in profile setting.

A public forum can also be common ground to disagree on.

People in the "everyone" categories you mention can be heard if they want to, the world and Internet are big enough for everyone. And I have the impression that you think you are the owner of the truth by putting categories that should NOT have free speech because you KNOW they are bad. You are wrong multiple times, first because your categories are extremely subjective (I know gun nuts that are very nice people with a passion for the Olympic sport called precision shooting), second because in a country where SCOTUS said something like "there is no exception for hate speech in the 1st A, so hate speech is protected speech" you want private organizations to be restrict what the government is not allowed to. For you free speech is a bad idea, but you think you can post on forums about that and benefit from the fact that the forums do not restrict your posts like you want to restrict others. Maybe your posts are more nocive than child porn, some food for thought.

> People in the "everyone" categories you mention can be heard if they want to, the world and Internet are big enough for everyone.

Which was exactly my point. "Facebook" is not "the world and Internet", is it? The question is about whether moderated forums have value to people (they do, you're reading one right now). Demanding that your moderated forum not be moderated affects whether or not people see it as valuable. Facebook wouldn't be Facebook without moderation to make it so. HN wouldn't be HN, Reddit wouldn't be Reddit, etc...

> you think you are the owner of the truth [...] For you free speech is a bad idea

Go. Away. This junk doesn't belong on HN. And I'm gonna bet you get flagged for that by the very moderation we're discussing.

Very simply, the biggest threat to Facebook and other tech companies is the legacy media they're replacing. Censorship is a complex issue. So any solution will get them eaten alive for not suiting literally everyone. Then you'll be pilloried for failing to appease the one nano-segment of society that thinks you went too far or not far enough.

For your solution, the NY Times will run stories about Facebook censoring us on Monday then stories about Facebook letting Nazis eat babies on Tuesday.

That's the issue Facebook faces here: not minimising social damage or maximising freedom, it's protecting share price and avoiding legislation due to economically motivated attacks.

Fyi, I actually really like your answer.

> -Allow users to customize what they want to see

This means that Facebook has to provide a process to categorize posts into the categories. Facebook argues they don't want to do that categorization.

No it doesn't. The customization could be done based on the source (Always/never show government officials posts, for example) or the votes of a trusted entity (the WHO, The White House, CNN, your cool friend who knows what is going on, etc). Plenty of empty gas bags have been identified by their reaction to Pandemic but also plenty of people who were right, early (and widely mocked at the time). There is signal there that users should be able to leverage.

I shortened my quote, for context the GP post had these examples:

> e.g. "dont show me posts that glorify violence" or "only allow covid posts that match WHO guidelines" or "allow exceptions from political figures or of historical significance")

Glorifying violence isn't objective measurable.

How do you identify matches to WHO guidance (incl. satire, valuable critique, ...)

How exactly do you identify "political figures or of historical significance" sure, you can identify elected officials, but what about opposition leaders which often are not formally designated or cases where elections are disputed?

And to be clear: I think the stance of "we are neutral" is wrong. And I don't think this can be offloaded to the user, while Facebook stays "neutral".

I agree that "hide things I won't like" isn't going to work but I think that for people in good faith the proxies I mentioned would be good enough. That however would not afford FB or anyone else control over other's speech, which I guess is what you think should be possible? Can you elaborate as to why you think that would be a net good?

Hi, thanks for following up. So you say all these things are hard and not objectively measurable, and I agree. But Facebook is already making these decisions, so in some ways it can be described as lettings users opt out of Facebook's curation in different ways.

I think perfect is the enemy of good in this case. Giving users more control is good.

I guess to be clear on my stance, I think Facebook should be trying to be as neutral as possible, and keep making progress on that front, knowing it is impossible to be perfectly neutral in every way.

Hmm. I think you may be onto something. Tagging may not be that hard ( though false positives may be an issue ) and only showing stated preferences. But do we want to move into slippery slope of 'show me car accidents with at least one fatality'.

That is where it gets hard, but I think its doable. And just to play with the thought experiment you would probably weigh things. Like would you want to see any car accidents on your street within 50 feet of your house? Maybe yes. 2 miles away? Probably not, but may be if they have a fatality sure. Car accident of a friend in another country? Maybe. A train wreck with 100 deaths in your state?

Basically you can adjust the likelihood of something showing on your feed by severity weighted by location and friend graph (showing less severe things closer to you and more severe things further away). This matches how I think humans actually process information.

What you're essentially advocating for is Facebook, exactly as it is today. Unless you default to censoring information, which is incredibly unlikely, you default to amplifying all hateful information.

> "only allow covid posts that match WHO guidelines"

That's cool, except for all of those people that have been that the WHO is secretly out to get them some how. The issue goes deeper...

This wouldn't satisfy the people angry at Zuckerberg. To them it's not about what they see, it's about what other people are allowed to see.

Doesn't Facebook work like this already? I imagine most of the people really angry about things Trump is posting don't follow him anyways. I'll occasionally unfollow (not unfriend) people who post nonsense repeatedly and my feed is remarkably clean.

Facebook usage scales with controversy. Rage is a more reliable predictor if virality than other emotions, so they want the controversy.

Because that would just be the Internet.

What do you do about illegal content?

Because when you operate at a scale measured in billions of souls, impacts and consequences are neither inconsequential nor personal. Neither are remediations and mitigations.

You find lone actors committing mass killings:

"New Zealand mosque shooter broadcast slaughter on Facebook"

https://apnews.com/ce9e1d267af149dab40e3e5391254530

You find genocides:

"A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

You find radicalisation:

"Prosecutors say Dylann Roof ‘self-radicalized’ online, wrote another manifesto in jail"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/08/2...

You find disinformation with global consequences:

"How fear of the unknown sows disinformation during a pandemic"

https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2020/4/10/21201986/misinform...

Yes, the examples listed include more than Facebook, but Facebook, and its "they trust me, dumb fucks" unitary executive (https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/11/19/18099011/mark-zuck...) is very much at the. heart of the problem.

Or, as some may better recognise the notion, "with great power comes great responsibility". Facebook and Zuckerberg consistently shirk theirs, and externalise the concommitant costs.

Anticipating the usual rebuttal that Facebook could not operate if it were required to act responsibly: if an organisation cannot exist or operate at scale without actively harming society, then it shouldn't exist.

The "individual responsibility" argument, going back to 1970s anti-littering campaigns and the crying (fake) Indian (fake) TV advert (and before), are corporate gambits to shirk their own obligations:

Annie Leonard, "Moving from Individual Change to Societal Change" (2013) [pdf]

http://www.pfree.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Moving-fro...

Don't buy it.

When you turn on the WHO guidelines filter are you just filtering or are you curating? Ultimately you have to form an opinion about whether the piece fits into that classification. With that particular class it may be clear, but with others it may be more grey. Right or wrong, thats what facebook is trying to avoid, attaching an opinion to the content, because then they subject to the same scrutiny twitter is facing with 230.

See you have a healthy respect for the idea of free expression, as do I

Unfortunately we are in the minority, the majority wants SOMEONE ELSE to choose what they can see, what is the "good speech" and what is the "bad speech"

They want someone else to tell them what the "good things" are they should be supporting, and what the "bad things" are that they need to oppose

In short, people no longer want to think critically for themselves, they want the magic box to do that for them

We simultaneously hate and fear Mark Zuckerberg and we want him to be the ultimate censor on everything we see and read. Somehow, we've decided that we want to demand that he take even more power.

I don’t use his surveillance platforms and I don’t fear him

I honestly don’t understand how this ignorant of a comment still gets on HN. What y’all are talking about is “The Internet” where all the trash and racist are free to make whatever content they want. What everyone else is talking about is private companies that publish trash based on recommendation engines, timeline visibility algorithms, sharing functions, and whole other bunch of programmed ways to “increase engagement.” If Facebook just wants to be the internet where you publish trash then I have to go find it on my own accord then manually share it to a list of other people, or where I can make a page with no special boosting to parrot that trash, then go right ahead. But that’s not what FB is doing, so don’t pretend that is.

We are discussing Facebook censoring the POTUS.

That IS what it is doing. The content you see on FB is posted by other humans, not by some 'algo' on FB.

That’s not true at all. The content is filtered out according to their algorithms. They ditched the “see everything your friends are doing” feed a long time ago. Even the group and friend suggestions are tailored.

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-peo...

Reranking content does not mean FB is the one producing it out of nothing.

Secondly what ranking you see is largely influenced by what you and your friends engage with.

Which is based on FB’s weighing of those factors...so either stop doing any ranking/recommendations and make FB a dumb pipe with no restrictions, or put guard rails on the ranking/recommendations so we don’t end up with extremists.

I am well aware, see you are upset that facebook is not filtering "the correct way", and facebook is promoting "the bad things" from your POV, and not promoting the "good things" from your POV.

My statement is Facebook should not be doing any promotation at all, and people aurging over the level and type of filtering / promotion is the problem

Facebook painted themselves into this corner by choosing what people will see and not see instead of letting user choose this for themselves. That is what the GrandParent was saying.

See you desire them to censor and filter, you want that you just disagree with their choices

I do not want them picking anything at all for anyone.

not sure how that makes me "ignorant" on this topic, or how my comment is some how wrong or misunderstanding what it happening. It seems more likely you are misunderstanding my comment

Of source this is all really pointless because I have never, and will never have either a Facebook or Twitter account so...

You’re sidestepping the discussion though. It is “when you avail yourself to FB, do we want FB to use its algorithms to push certain content.” I see two options: stop any ranking/recommendations and make FB a dumb pipe with no restrictions, or put guard rails on the ranking/recommendations so we don’t end up with extremists.

>> I honestly don’t understand how this ignorant of a comment still gets on HN. What y’all are talking about is “The Internet” where all the trash and racist are free to make whatever content they want.

Oh, the irony.

Racism is protected speech. Hate is protected speech. You seem not to understand free speech so you want it suppressed - it sounds a lot like the Inquisition in good ol' times.

Where am I calling for suppression? I’m saying I don’t want it promoted via FB’s algorithms. The internet is open, just like the ol’ public square. As much as I hate 4chan, those idiots can still post. But FB is not the internet and never has been. It has been letting hate run amok and then promoting it. Imagine if every time I went online Comcast kept track of all the sites I went to then would recommend sites it thinks I would like. You get how that Comcast is different than the Comcast today? (Ignoring the fact that Comcast does keep track of what I visit).

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