Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone?
It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until someone comes up with a feasible solution, we'll just have to exempt them from being responsible!"
Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up."
Every drug has acceptable levels of impurities. There is a non-zero acceptable level of rat feces in your food. Your bank rounds the value of your account to some decimal place. The various parts of your car have some mean time between failures.
In the real world we place bounds on how much bad stuff is acceptable, and these bounds are determined mostly by practicality and economics. "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world. A real law takes the form "perform these steps or reasonable equivalents to limit X to a tolerable level." You can claim that reddit is not taking a step it is required to by law, but it's not breaking the law just because it hasn't developed a perfect solution to a problem that likely can only be solved approximately.
That is exactly why I only but medications from Valisure.
> "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world.
This would be a reasonable argument for a company like YouTube which has spent tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars putting controls in place. If PornHub had iron tight controls and one of the actors was caught using a fake ID, then it might be reasonable. But they didn't have iron tight controls... or apparently any controls. There was zero verification that participants had signed releases or were of age.
PornHub's controls were complete shit.
Maybe some people want drugs from Pfizer's "Community Sourced" drug program... I sure don't.
What do you mean, "imagine?" They do say that[1], and it's a tremendous problem.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2019/07/19/bottle-x-exposing-impuri...
That's the innovation. What if we are a media publisher but than without worker rights and unions? Youtube.
What if we start a hotel franchise but without any regulation or oversight or liability? Airbnb.
What if we start a cab company but make all our employees independent contractors, ignore all regulations and put all liability and legal risk on the independent contractors?
Silicon Valley is nothing but a bunch of young spoiled boys asking themselves the most American business question of all: have you tried slavery yet?
Business model innovations where you make money while someone pays all the costs.
>Is there a “right way” to do this that protects everyone
There is no investment if you do that, because the competitive advantage comes from the stealing. Nobody is investing in technology. Nobody is doing actual R&D. It's all about the viability of the scam. How profitable is this loophole?
We go out of our way to engineer protocols and technology and platforms that make it impossible to do that the right thing (by design). From p2p networks in the 90ties to crypto currencies. From YouTube to Spotify.
It's a dog eat dog world and I'm not here judging any individual. But let's not be naive.
Theft is the plan. Abuse is the strategy. Fortunes are not built on sweat. The people who work hard are the ones you hire to clean our house. The ones that pick our vegetables.
But we at least show the respect to others to not lie about the true nature of the successes of our industry.
I don't understand this bit. So are you saying crypto currencies are making it impossible to do the right thing?
If so, what do you mean by that?
Cryptocurrencies are designed to subvert regulation and oversight. That's the selling point. That current societal infrastructure to protect innocent (sometimes gullible) people from everything from weapons trade or pyramid schemes.
If you want to 'make it do the right thing', thats already exists and is your wallet. Thats called money. A ledger with a tax identity. A bank account that requires a legal id. There is no point in burning all this electricity to verify those hashes, except to circumvent regulation and law.
I can't start a pyramid scheme and steal money from gullable idiots. Thankfully, an ICO is completely legal (for now). If you want to sell bread to hungry people, use money. If you want to sell guns to a hitman, use a cryptocurrency. Thats why cryptocurrencies are economically viable compared to money. Because they make it harder to apply the laws we voted on democratically, like how you can't sell children for sex.
The reason any money out there is investing into cryptocurrency technology, is because of the expectation of moral subserversion of society. Its a not a side effect. Its the bussiness model.
What do you think Venture Capital considers some startups worth so much money? Because they see the potential of price dumping and becoming a monopolist. If markets were actually properly regulated to always keep competition alive, people wouldn't be investing millions into apps and websites, they would be investing in actual R&D and hard science.
But doing the real work, can never compete, with just plain cheating. You always make more money being the bad guy. Even if a lot of startups have sincere intentions (Facebooks' mission was to connect people, not destroy democracy), the money will chase the decision down.
All of these sound wrong:
- Walmarts are huge! It's impossible to build fire suppression at that scale.
- Ford builds an insane number of cars every year, it's not possible to ensure each car is safe at that scale.
- The United States burns 20,000 barrels of oil PER DAY. It's simply not possible to ensure a "safe" product at that scale.
- This buffet serves 20,000 plates per day, it's impossible to ensure food safety at that scale.
Each of those problems has been ~solved. Or those business wouldn't be operating. You only need to moderate a million messages if your customers are posting that many. If you can't afford to hire moderators to handle those million messages maybe it's your business model that's the problem, not moderation.
The same applies to tech. Content moderation has been ~solved as well. The overwhelming majority of content on social media platforms, websites, etc is regular, legal content. The illegal content that makes it through the filters and stays up for a significant period of time is a rounding error.
I strongly disagree. Pornhub just purged 10 million videos because they couldn't moderate out child porn and rape videos.
There's terrible content all over Facebook
- Using Facebook's own numbers ~750,000 instances of "child nudity and sexual exploitation" were reported by users before being removed in Q3 2020. https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...
- Facebook’s improved AI isn’t preventing harmful content from spreading https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/19/facebooks-improved-ai-isn...
- Despite Facebook ban on Holocaust denial, it’s still easy to find https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/despite-facebook-ban-on-holoc...
> I strongly disagree. Pornhub just purged 10 million videos because they couldn't moderate out child porn and rape videos.
PornHub is not a good example here. Reactive content moderation doesn't work for porn, because it's too hard to distinguish a positive from a negative. Content moderation for porn has probably been solved...by using a per-clearance model coupled with strong identity verification.
> There's terrible content all over Facebook
That's probably true, but the worst appears to be much harder to find. It's a lot easier to detect and ban all porn (especially if you can ban all nudity) than just certain heinous kinds of porn specifically.
> - Facebook’s improved AI isn’t preventing harmful content from spreading https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/19/facebooks-improved-ai-isn...
> - Despite Facebook ban on Holocaust denial, it’s still easy to find https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/despite-facebook-ban-on-holoc...
Facebook seems to have more problems with trickier things, like hate speech, holocaust denial, and mis/disinformation. We have pretty good technology now for recognizing things in images, but we don't nearly technology that good for understanding the meaning of speech and text.
This is the error. The problem isn't scale. If YouTube has 500 hours of video uploaded per minute and some other site has only one minute of video uploaded per minute, the smaller site is no better able to handle it, because they don't have proportionally any more staff than YouTube.
The actual problem is marginal cost.
If you have a Walmart store, it probably costs over a million dollars to construct it, and takes in several million dollars a year in revenue. A $10,000 fire suppression system may be expensive, but it's manageable. And if there are a thousand Walmart stores all over the country that each need a $10,000 fire suppression system, that scales just fine. You have a choice between an unsafe Walmart and a safe Walmart whose proprietors make slightly less profit.
The marginal profit from hosting a given video is pennies. That means any solution that costs more than pennies isn't a choice between unsafe and safe video hosting, it's a choice between having video hosting and not having it. Scale has nothing to do with it; greater or lesser scale doesn't save you from a cost that exceeds your entire margin.
I'm sure someone is going to mention that this is in fact exactly how laws are applied in practice, but that's a separate discussion.
People who would like to change the law should certainly feel responsible to weight potential undesirable effects.
You do it the way the porn industry has for years. You get consenting actors. You get releases from the participants. You keep track of who is in the videos.
If you are hosting third party content, you verify they do the above.
This isn't like hosting a Disney movie on YouTube. If you screw this up, there are real victims here. There should be some weight and repercussions to posting child porn, revenge porn, or any kind of porn where some of the actors have not signed off on it.
- Any moderation policy will anger someone
- Content moderation is inherently subjective
- Errors at scale result in many errors over time
Mike Masnick goes into this at depth here:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
the three points above were taken from the video posted in this comment:
Spoiler: where the latter makes it way more manageable, and for the former it is near undoable.
https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01...