Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them
lincoln.metacannon.net
lincoln.metacannon.net
Under the heading "Why Facebook Doesn't Ban Everyone", Lincoln explains how social network theory can identify individuals in networks that are influential. This isn't an exaggeration - basic graph heuristics (such as comparing in/out degree of an individual relative to other parts of the social graph) can easily identify such individuals. Censoring those individuals can have an amplified effect on the graph structure as a whole.
For an example of how just a few individuals can make a big difference on graph structure, check out Watts & Strogatz's 1998 paper, Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks [0][1]. I'd highly recommend reading it - it's very short and easy to understand.
Essentially, a small number of connectors connecting with random individuals can seriously reduce the average number of steps to connect any two individuals. If Facebook wanted to stop the spread of a narrative that they didn't like, censoring just these few individuals would make it much harder for information to flow through the graph as a whole, and hardly anyone would notice (since Facebook's only censoring a few people.)
Scary.
When people complain that people are increasingly finding themselves in echo chambers, and that "people don't talk to people from the other side," connectedness across the graph is dropping, while connectedness within cliques remains strong or increases.
Perhaps the algorithm can be defeated by employing a few extra "link" accounts (either sock puppets or simply ardent followers) with a shared reputation (a shared brand).
On other words a link between two cliques could be held by a special kind of clique.
I wrote a few months ago about this sort of danger: https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
These sorts of communication systems work, until the moment they don't, and we won't receive advance notice.
Twitter would be a lot more credible (although anything times zero is still zero) if they didn't have the checkbox "Let people who have your phone number find and connect with you on Twitter" on their "security" lockout verification page.
And, somehow, Twitter keeps spamming my email address in spite of my account having been "locked".
Sorry ... not sorry. No phone number for you.
As your account ages there will be more information about whether you are real or not. Stopping the influx of bots before they do damage is important. Therefore it’s quite likely that Twitter ban accounts early if they look like bots based on not much info (and potentially if they look low value).
You followed a few people who are popular account (not friends, fairly anonymous) but not mainstream accounts (so you’re a little more atypical) and then you post once with, sorry to say it, not particularly inspired/original/specific/human content. Perhaps there were other factors. I’d guess you didn’t go through and fill out your profile much if you weren’t that invested in the idea? No birthday or avatar maybe? Not following the easy setup steps that Twitter encourage you to do?
Combine this looking a little like a bot with the likelihood that you’re going to be low value because you’re not that engaged (debatable I know), and it kinda makes sense.
All speculation, but a possibility. Should Twitter be doing this? I don’t think it’s the worst thing, but it’s a trade off. If this is it then it would imply that your marketing efforts for your game would probably not be affected at all.
Why?
When people notice they're only seeing, hearing from, and seeing retweets from bots, they're likely to leave Twitter. That would be bad for Twitter.
A new account might incorrectly trigger an account lock due to signals for proxy detection, another lock for a specific 2017 bot wave with Romanian IP addresses and a third generic fake account lock. That, in turn, triggers a recidivism threshold that sets off a permanent disable.
Working ‘at scale’ means that developers who unravel old code to fix a use-blocking problem for 5000 users can be considered astronomically less productive than someone who fixes a minor problem for 100,000+.
They’ll route around black holes.
Conversation will not simply stop. It will move to a different platform or, should the network of platforms using HTTP look black holes, where useful into goes in but little useful info comes out, will pivot to a new protocol.
The really important infrastructure is the hardware and basic protocols.
There’s no reason see the network “inside Twitter” as important. Highly visible, but it’s just one groups choice of what to store in a database.
Alternatives can be copy-pasted together in hours by competent groups.
Tech is so up it’s own ass these days because it’s measuring inside a few Petri dishes and ignoring the Internet as a concept in and of itself.
The internet is not FAANG and Silicon Valley. It’s the hardware everywhere and fundamental protocols.
So, yes, the math is right. But the math applies at various scales. For as visible as Twitter and the rest are, they’re not in and of themselves a distributed global network of hardware and routing protocols. They’re black holes in a bigger universe.
1) they don't feel they can NOT police content
2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually
3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway...
4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code words for objectionable content)
I don't see how FB can get out of this situation. Any social network that is as large as it is, which relies on advertising (and thus cannot be as content-neutral as e.g. phone companies are regarding what you talk about on the phone), is going to face the same situation.
Of course, if FB ends up getting way smaller as a result, that would be fine by me. But I'm not holding my breath...
If you ask 10 good, experienced, human moderators whether a controversial post is allowed, you'll probably get at least 15 different answers and justifications.
FB would probably find it harder to train from this, as each moderator will be using different justifications, and reaching different decisions.
At FB's scale, they want something cheap and straightforward which they can implement automatically and go Kafka on the lack of appeals. The reality people need to wake up to is that when a business is at FB scale, people who fall through the cracks due to a broken algorithm simply don't matter. Google doesn't care if you get locked out of your Gmail, in the same way FB doesn't care if you get spuriously banned.
When users place more value on a service than the service places on them as a customer, it feels like a market failure scenario that leads to these kinds of outcomes. When the go-to price is $0 though, it isn't clear how you resolve this.
But 2 (scale) makes this solution to 3 and 4 expensive / impractical.
If you think rossdavidh is right about those issues Facebook is having (and I think he's right), then that's the reality in which the company has to operate. If a business model leads to infeasible costs due to fundamental issues, maybe that business model shouldn't exist as such.
Obviously Facebook (or any other company) doesn't want to do anything that significantly increases their costs without providing revenue if they can avoid it, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be expected of them.
Instagram and WhatsApp thrived only because Facebook acquired them, else both companies new they would be smothered to death. That pretty much fits the bill of "acquired... Using investment capital and money from first mover advantages".
They don't need you to use your FB account because they cross share data anyways. It's not like it's a painstaking operation to link different accounts, once you have all sorts of device data (which Facebook had, even on Apple devices up until recently).
Much to the dismay of many. Maybe it's the test case FB is monitoring to look how to move ahead with their other acquisitions. Last I heard Quest 2 sales are good..
Yes, but this isn't really analogous to the complaint being presented. In the Mastadon world this article would have been titled "A Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them". The author is still free to use B, C, D etc, just like with http websites.
> Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.
To be clear, I do think an ActivityPub-like architecture is preferable for social networking, but federation doesn't obviate the concept of popularity, it only seems that way now because the fediverse isn't popular, if it ever did become popular then we'd see the exact same complaints when people get banned from popular instances.
What A defederating from B is like a website blocking your IP. Facebook banning an account is more like your ISP turning off your internet access.
As such, being kicked from one instance leads you to sign up elsewhere, until a major instance notices and tells your new server admin to kick you out. When you create your own instance, the major instances use their soft power to ensure almost nobody else federates with you.
That future is only one regulation away. The most common reason for staying on Facebook ("all my friends are there") disappears.
They can already do that. Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.
> There's absolutely no technical reason for everyone to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one and communicating with others regardless of what they've picked
This is already a thing.
> Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.
Deleting Facebook causes you to lose access to your Facebook connections. Why can't you just use your Twitter account to communicate with someone on Facebook? There's zero technical reason for this not to be possible.
> This is already a thing. https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
It's not. It's a third party workaround that Facebook could kill at any point if it gave a shit. Do I really need to explain to you how that's different than first party support for something so basic? Just like with email, you should be able to enter a username and a IM provider and just talk to them as if you're using the same platform. It's really not rocket science.
Fediverse (Mastodon and compatible providers) already does that without any hiccups. It's possible, we know it works for decades (since we all use email), and it should be a requirement for every social network / IM service in existence.
To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.
Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.
Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff. They’re not paying $7.5 bil to just allow people to post whatever content they want now! Very quickly they will run out obviously clear-cut cases and will be moderating anything and everything under the sun.
How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic... I cannot imagine.
So what? If that cost is necessary to run a platform that is safe for those who are on it (= from spammers, catfishers, threats, pedophiles or right-wing extremists) and that does not serve as a breeding ground for threats for society (= "freemen"/"Reichsbürger" groups, militias, neo-Nazis, antisemites, Qanon, ...), then this cost should be paid by the ones making the profit (=Facebook), not society.
> Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff.
So what? The digital equivalent of police(wo)men on patrol. Just because it's The Internet, it should not be a free-for-all land.
> How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic
The US alone has nearly 700k police officers for 300M people, that are running around with guns and regularly kill people, and yet society accepts this.
Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that current user:moderator ratio is very obviously insufficient.
In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...
No society with numbers north of somewhere in the two digits works without some kind of rules, administration, and enforcement. I'll bet you there are at least half a million people staffing courts in the US, maybe even a full million, and probably an equal number of law enforcement officers, and that doesn't get to public and private attorneys which is probably another million.
Which means something like 1% of the population of the US is probably involved in just administering the laws of society.
Now, maybe for a society where the limits of how people interact is communication you could get away with lower overhead. But that's going to be a constant factor of the same underlying dynamic.
Also, we've done the same damn thing with freedom of discourse that we have with almost every other liberty in the US: we turn it into a thought-stopping cliche and glide on treating it as an indulgence rather than investing in thinking about the limits, edge cases, and responsibilities.
If all mods are routinely screening each other’s work, everyone has an incentive to be fair. Biased mod decisions are thus a risk to your continued employment because you know your work is spot-checked.
Fixed that. Maybe some nefarious three-letter agency found another way, maybe not. Even if they did, they have a powerful incentive never to let it be known. And it's still almost entirely algorithmic.
On the other hand, human moderators are inherently going to be entry-level individuals in a call center in a low-wage country. These are not the same things.
How would you feel about human moderation of your email?
But I do have to say that it is neither how the law works in many places, not is it ethically correct.
Oh hell no they aren't too big, they just don't want to reduce their profits from the current 18.5 billion US $ (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...).
If Facebook wanted, they could massively ramp up staffing, hire them themselves, and pay them a livable wage instead of outsourcing the cost that their business occurs on society (who has to pick up the slack from conspiracy myths, fascism and other shit), on the users who are mistakenly banned and lose their primary contact e.g. to overseas family, and on the moderation staff that is hired via third parties and exploited.
Keep in mind that while a human being is very good at categorizing things, they're terrible at doing it over and over again, so the scarce talents are likely consistency and conscientiousness.
You should expect that, overall, the (n+1)th person you hire is marginally less talented than the nth. And while people are constantly entering and exiting the labor pool, this is negated by the fact that you're trying to expand your share of it.
So while there's a lot of randomness in recruiting, if you enforce any kind of standard, you'll hit a point where not enough candidates meet that standard, so you have to drop it. Once it is below the threshold of "better than AI" you have no reason to hire more people.
And you'll try to expand your eligible pool by raising wages, but everyone else wants consistent, conscientious people, too, so you're liable to run into the economic constraint: the amount you have to pay someone will exceed the value they're adding as a moderator.
True.
But we should be explicit here-- FB isn't some neat, nerdy social graph software that just happened to get really popular, like git for regular people or something. They have a business model to shake up their social graph to maximize engagement, and the implementation achieves this by keeping everyone maximally mad as hell at each other. It spreads conspiracy theories efficiently. It and its users are easily exploited, and they continue to be exploited by any nation-state, nefarious actors, or even just some dude looking to make a buck spreading fake news. That all feeds into the same destructive behaviors for the users as the system desperately tries to keep them engaging more and more. Facebook's own software and UI exacerbates these problems.
With that starting point in mind, I agree with your 1, 2, 3, and 4 above. But this is less like email having to deal with new sets of problems as it scaled to the entire world. It's more like a drug cartel trying to figure out the maximum amount of their fundamentally destructive product they can sell before the government finally decides to comes in and break up their enterprise.
The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually perceived to be neutral by most people, then you create distrust which further fuels conspiracy theories. Also a conspiracy theory may actually be true. Jeffrey Epstein was not discussed during the 2016 election aside from a few fringe articles. It was too toxic for mainstream to touch. And everyone in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein and even joked about it. These topics were covered up only for so long. Today there are lots of insane and farfetched theories being floated. But the theories being censored today that are indeed based in reality, will eventually become common knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their trust.
Discussion, debate, argument, evidence, analysis lead us towards truth. Mute only appears to work and can be a useful political tool for only so long.
Today our public forum is virtual, but still a public forum. Trump wasn’t allowed to block certain followers because of their right to be in the forum and hear from their president.
So the question is whether governments will acknowledge this fact and limit the power of our big tech group communication platforms and enforce transparency and non-biased appeals process. Or will they cede total control of our public forums to Big Tech out of short term political convenience.
But by that time almost no-one would care. And this is probably what they're counting on.
I don't disagree with your point but it isn't relevant to mine.
I'll only add that it's going to be difficult as hell to stay on topic as FAANG pushes back against attempts to deal with their monopoly practices. Uber and Lyft effortlessly destroyed the original meaning of "ride-sharing" for their own interests. Expect Google, Facebook, and Twitter to put all their weight behind narrowing the meaning of free speech to simply mean ensuring everybody has equal access to be manipulated by their commercial blackboxes.
Having said that, I think if FB were to stop doing that, some other social network would, and would replace FB the way they replaced MySpace. So again, I think the current "we want one social network for everyone" situation, inevitably produces this kind of behavior.
But, I agree with your point, and it is a good one.
Per my views on the situation, Zuck is cooked. When he went before congress to testify, he was being given the classic robber-baron deal that the US has used a few times now. As an analogy to actual robber-baron, at first when the railroads were new, Congress didn't care much about them. Then when all the businesses and politicians started to use them, they started to notice that the railroads were very important. When beef suspiciously didn't get to Chicago on time, or when trains delayed representatives to important votes up in Albany, then the politicians got legislative. A similar scaling of importance has occurred with big tech.
The US then typically takes these newly vital sectors and then gives them the deal: Fix it or face jail time. Compliance means that your family for countless generations is never poor again. You go kite-surfing for the rest of your days. Congress works with you to write the laws in such a way that you get a monopoly on the sector with a nice 3% above inflation growth baked in. Congress and the US get a sector that isn't scammy and just works (albeit poorly at times). Congress gets you to testify for a few days, ensures that you have lied to congress in that time, and holds that jail time over you as leverage to comply.
Zuck was given this deal.
Per the points OP outlines, Zuck cannot follow through on his end of the bargain. He cannot get FB to work the way Congress is demanding that he do. Zuck may not be facing jail time (yet), but may when he gets in front of Congress again.
After Dec. 37th / Jan. 6th (because 2020 never ends), Congress likely sees Big Tech as a direct personal threat (not existential) and is likely to move directly against that threat with due haste.
The other point I would add, is that it's not just Congress. I have heard government leaders in Mexico, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey all voicing similar concerns, and in some cases actually passing legislation already. I think more will come.
And that means that they will need to staff up and that will come out of their profit margins, and that's okay. That's why they need to be forced to do it by regulations.
One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.
Are we not living on the same planet?
They end up owning "the web".
Similarly in China if you're not on WeChat your business is effectively dead.
I very much also disagree with this monopolization over peoples' lives but its starting to become a worldwide phenomenon on at least a per-country basis.
The only one that comes to mind (and that annoyed me the other day) is ProductHunt, which has 4 options for signup, but not email.
I am not so sure about candidates for public offices, though. Especially in majority voting systems. Not having a social network presence may be crippling for their electability.
* It can still be bridged to Matrix, ensuring you don't have to use Telegram if you don't want to
* There are open-source Telegram clients (at least for Android)
* It doesn't sound like too much more effort: One extra message weekly (for sales), and one extra message daily (truck location)
* Using one doesn't preclude you from using the other - you don't reduce his exposure or sales, and help him reach customers who hate FB as much as your Snap-On dealer.
* It reduces everyone's dependence on Facebook
All that said, my Snap-On dealer just has his cell number available, and follows a predictable route - we know he stops by every other Monday, and we can text him if we need something swapped out. It works for us, but I won't pretend to know your guys business better than him.
Facebook may not be necessary, but there is a very high probability it is the only social medium that the majority of your acquaintances & relatives use.
Being forcibly disconnected from humanity is extremely isolating & harsh.
It's not like leaving Facebook turns you into a hermit. If it does, then maybe it's time to find a new group of friends.
Even if I did have contact info for a thousand people & kept a schedule, maintained contact on a 1:1 basis, took the time to inform myself of people's lives, isn't it a bit rude & disrespectful, an ineffective use of other people's time, to make them recount toe personally what's going on, what's happened to them? Literally call them up & ask them to repeat the events of their social media deed for the past month? Oh and read me peoplecs tries too. Who "loved" that status update? Can you send those pictures? The asks, the wastes of time, to get anything resbling the faintest hint of parity, are practically endless.
This is just blindingly blaringly obviously unacceptable in every way. Facebook's monopoly on mainstream people-you-know social media has ipso facto come to be humanities warm glow, the fire we gather by. Getting dropped out of the exchanges & chatter of humanity is a cruel & bitter fate, a shocking act.
Your poo-poo'ing dismissal of access to the locked-on standard of sharing life events & baby photos seems so heartless to me. You don't seem to be willing to budge, to show an iota of sympathy for people's use, any willingness to acknowledge that this monopoly of broadcast human connection (& replies) is such an overwhelming monopoly because it works, because it has suceeded, because it is efficient & useful. It is that way because everyone is there. It's won because it came out on top, because metcalf's rule is true; the value of a network is (exponentially at first, sigmoiding eventually to 1, a fully connected universe) proportional to the amount of nodes and connections on it.
Being denied the ability to not only write but to read too to the world's one and only mass human network is unbearably cruel. You should show some sympathy. I agree that life can be pretty good without it, that we can cut loose a lot of the ambient connections we otherwise would never keep. But that ability to connect, to humanize at such a massively larger scale than was possible before is, to me, absolute magical & I love those who do use it well.
I just wish it wasn't a monopoly, mostly. This connectivity is too vital, too good to be Facebook's & Facebook's alone.
Also, the Facebook story isn't finished yet. Is it really that far-fetched to believe that their influence over our lives could 10x over the next 50 years? I hope it won't, but I wouldn't be willing to put my money on it. So keeping in mind that the context of this thread is about getting permanently banned on Facebook, for anyone who thinks that might have zero impact on them, I would suggest you still keep a foot in the door in case you change your mind down the road.
Just because something isn't strictly necessary doesn't mean that life can't become difficult without it. The sad fact of the matter is that by cutting off Facebook you're also cutting off the primary way of staying in touch with some people along with things like events and so on. Yes there are workarounds, of course there is but the vast majority of people don't care and can't be convinced to care about the politics and social effects of Facebook's dominant position.
Also as a buyer, I have to use my mother or friend Facebook account to find items or contact sellers.
I'm strongly passionate about rock climbing, and try to structure my life around it as my primary form of recreation. If I'm traveling for leisure, climbing is a big part of the agenda. There are many communities for finding people to climb with on Facebook, and I've used them extensively.
Without facebook, I'd more often have to resort to self-belaying, which is much more dangerous (among other reasons, if you're knocked unconscious there's no one to start a rescue or call for help). Having access to the various regional climbing groups on facebook has put me in touch with so many people, so I have only had to do that on a handful of occasions.
There are other examples I can think of, even if none of them have been so drastic. But without access to Facebook, many people would have their lives seriously impacted, and possible lack of access to life-saving resources.
There are several reports about people logging in after a year and seeing the same message as the day they were banned from Facebook.
PS I made https://www.quitfacebook.org, so it seems we've got something in common :)
No, not sarcasm, no, not joking. I had decades old email addresses of friends I pinged when the lockdown started, and the vast majority of them got to the intended person.
EDIT: yes, one by one. If they matter to you, they should worth the time.
Reading this stuff makes me glad that nobody I care about still uses Facebook for anything more than sharing the odd picture. Soon I'll be able to delete it entirely, and hopefully decentralized social networks will indeed become popular.
Now if only we had some sort of open website aggregator on top of which people could build search engines. Sort of like an analogous for what OpenStreetMap is for geographic data. Maybe it already exists—I'm a bit ashamed to say that I haven't actively looked for it nor have I heard of such a thing—but whether it does or not, it'd be a huge step in the right direction. I think that any progress toward a decentralized web is a bit weakened if search results continue to be provided at the whim of only a few actors. But I'm digressing at this point.
For one-to-many newsfeed-style posting: few good options. Twitter lacks fine-grained privacy and audience controls.
It would take a massive amount of VC money to compete with something like Facebook, so it's not weird, there is very little VC left for social media.
The FAANG will probably conspire to kill your platform anyway, before it reaches some significant adoption, if you depend on any of their services.
It’s quite difficult to break community standards when your account is only 2 minutes old, has no content yet, and uses your legal name and phone number.
I had to give up on the new account, then go back and recreate an account using my old email address. Ironically, I wasn’t able to reuse the url name from the past.
Their stuff is broken and very imperfect, and the resolution path is simply non-functional.
Very nice.
Any European users could make 2 requests - one for access to their data, and one to exercise their right to data portability.
Most companies don't have a great process for the latter, many don't have anything for it.
[0] https://thedataprivacygroup.com/blog/facebook-refuses-subjec...
I always wonder why almost all papers and essentially all tutorials and courses spend literally zero time discussing whether that is the right thing to estimate.
In the future, when these algorithms decide everything about our lives, people will either conform and uniformize themselves to the expectation,
or they will find themselves secretly banned, silenced, left out, rejected or whatever it is, always without knowledge why and without recourse.
It’ll be strange for people, if we even hear about it.
But it is, well, expected.
THAT should be illegal. Suspension should provide a clear statement of the exact reasons for suspension of the account (a generic 'it did not follow our Community Standards' is far from exact. It's a totalitarian standard), and should offer a path to satisfactory resolution. (And not an 'adjudicated' one.)
Disabling should only follow a refusal to abide by those standards. Else, probation. Companies that profit from operating in democracies need to be strongly encouraged to follow democratic principles or move elsewhere. Otherwise they are disruptive agents.
https://twitter.com/LincolnCannon/status/1353483168792240128...
Probably a good idea to remember here, that Facebook is a private company, not a public utility.. The actual problem is that there is no public-utility alternative to Facebook.
"They're a private company, they can decide what they do, or do not, want to host."
It's all fun until you're on the receiving end of that.
His posts included the following keywords or phrases: "capitalism", "socialism", "political and economic elites", "Christian Transhumanist Association", "New God Argument", "Gospel", "heirs in the glory of God", "God ensures the right spirit is associated with the right body during human-mediated procreation", "gun", "Bitcoin", "Trump." I'm also thinking that if the word "decentralization" mattered at all, it was because of its proximity to "revolution" on the political dimension.
I don't want to get into the argument about whether Facebook should be doing this or not. I do think the author is severely mistaken for assuming Facebook cares about his personal, fringe ideas on social media, considering the actual societal issues being navigated by the company right now.
Superficially it of course makes sense that a business doesn't need to serve people who criticize them. However, social media giants are practically a significant actor in the society, not just a random business down the road, and they should accordingly be held to a higher standard.
Life is too short for Facebook.
"The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her"
“they’re a private company they can do whatever they want”
this week:
omg facebook evil. they banned who they wanted
Damn, are we really gonna anthropomorphize AI when it's the cause of so much misery already? [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964830-automating-ineq...
I don't think that's gonna happen. And if it did, it wouldn't be real, and those that think it is are fooling themselves. Only biological organisms feel. Why are you wishing for a cold lump of steel to feel something?
In my mind only someone who struggles severely with emotional intimacy with other humans would want to create a machine that tries to imitate human feelings, and thus ‘suffer’; likely done in an effort to try to feel close to 'it'. It sounds like that person might not be having their human needs for safety, connection and acceptance met, which is very painful. I think tackling this issue is the important and worthy cause. That would be better than spending money on some Hollywood-inspired notion of 'AI' - which itself seems more a story made up to keep the USA spending insane sums of taxpayer money on research, weapons and other tech at DARPA.
I do think society is super alienating to most humans in it's current form [1], so I can somewhat understand the science fiction.
What is your definition of suffering though?
It's a matter of debate in philosophy of mind as to whether it's plausible that hardware can possibly have qualia, or whether that's a property that's exclusive to wetware. I personally think it's quite likely that they will be able to, I don't see anything intrinsically special about wetware that's necessary for the generation of qualia.