Facebook says I'm abusive content [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Doing this at scale with semi-automated systems is quite literally impossible but until the courts start sanctioning social networks for their ad-hoc censorship (if this is even enforceable), we are sadly unlikely to see a change.
I don't think that's obvious at all.
You're saying that it's more important not to remove videos that aren't in violation of the platform's terms, eg false positives in the automated removal process, than it is to remove videos that are, eg actual content that should be removed. Why is it more important that someone's video remains on Facebook than Facebook removes illegal or toxic content? If acceptable videos are removed by mistake is that actually a problem that means the automated process isn't fit for purpose?
... social networks for their ad-hoc censorship...
Facebook removing a video is not censorship. They're not saying "no one can see this video". They're saying "we don't want to host this video". Those are absolutely not the same thing.
For the same reason that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".
> Facebook removing a video is not censorship. They're not saying "no one can see this video". They're saying "we don't want to host this video". Those are absolutely not the same thing.
Facebook has so much market share that they're uncomfortably close to the same thing.
Unfortunately, that is not a mantra that will keep your platform DMCA compliant.
Also, how exactly does it apply to an internet mob calling for someone's head? Do we apply this mantra to protect the mob's behaviour, or to protect the person the mob is targeting?
The platforms do just that, by removing the content in question.
Not even justice system uses that rule.
I'm not saying which is the case here, but certainly that the argument could be made.
I don't see the value of this distinction. Creating a system where it is more likely that guilty go free is the practical equivalent of creating a system where more guilty go free.
I wasn't commenting on how well the analogy fits censorship. Though I would note that the criminal justice system doesn't set all people free, just that it adopts a more slanted standard of proof than the laxer standard used in some other judicial situations like civil and immigration courts. The discussion over allowable levels of false positives fits better than a dichotomy comparing a world with traffic laws to anarchy or something.
That would require someone to believe Facebook taking down a video is equivalent to someone being found guilty of a crime they didn't commit. No one believes that.
If Facebook deletes your video that's annoying. It might even affect your livelihood if you've decided to Facebook videos is your chosen career. It isn't the same as being found guilty of a crime you didn't commit.
"No false positives at all" is a good and proper goal for the justice system. Facebook's moderation system doesn't need to be held to the same, or even a similar, bar. False positives in video content removal are a very minor problem.
Why not? I don't see a practical difference between Facebook wrongfully labelling a video as abusive and city wrongfully labelling your car as illegally parked. Former might even be more financially damaging.
Except it does? For people who make their living from Youtube or whatever video platform, removing a video (usually without an appeals process) is basically a punishment regardless of guilt.
Arguing that Facebook has a near-monopoly on online video is also nonsense - the guy we're talking about posted on YouTube about this. Clearly he has other options.
The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish, and that they're being censored and punished if Facebook chooses not to, makes me hope that HN readers never choose to start video hosting platforms. They'd be completely awful.
By that token, if your government decides to deport you, you are not being punished because you have no claim on citizenship you haven't lived yet. It's just the end of a citizenship relationship.
Hopefully you can see how that argument isn't helpful or useful. Would it be any more true if the Government delegated citizenship management to a corporation? Or three?
In an online-only world, where speech (and such livelihood being contingent on access) is controlled by companies, and nation states have no requirement to provide a different mechanism, it could be reasonably argued that a company giving everyone else a platform but denying you a platform has free-speech consequences.
The fact that it isn't managed that way, and that the law doesn't currently see it that way, doesn't change whether we should change our thinking as society changes.
Being a citizen of a country isn't a business relationship. You're not simply doing something and receiving payment in return. So it can be a punishment - the government is taking something away that you've earned through previous actions (eg applying for citizenship or asylum or winning a green card).
If Facebook were to demand an author return the money they'd been paid for videos when they're deleted then it would be a punishment. But they don't do that.
Couldn't the same argument justify segregated businesses e.g. restaurants with "No blacks or Irish".
You might thing racial lines make it a different thing, but TBH, if there is unacceptable harms in discriminating on race, I can't see how it can't also exist discriminating on opinion/speech, which is also important (as Freedom of Speech is considered important, at least in the US).
If private business can be regulated on one topic, why not another? Plus the argument can be flipped: Yes, that is their business, so they can choose who they do business with; but this is our country, so we can choose who is allowed to do business, and how.
> The number of people who here to argue that they have some sort of 'right' to upload content for Facebook to publish
But people do have the right to speak freely. If all public domains where private, they would effectively lose that right. The issue here isn't just that facebook determines who can "speak", but that facebook and only a few other tech giants dominate the "cyber" public domain - and alternatives like parler disallowed one similar ground "why should private hosting not be allowed to choose who they host"; at some point if you allow private companies to monopolize something, and without regulations on how, they end up dictating how people are allowed to use anything in that domain.
There's the actual problem. Let's work on that, and preserve the freedom of association.
That sounds great until the scandals of the type "Someone reposted SFW segments of this girl's revenge porn video and Facebook is taking days to remove them every time; since they're reposted every 24h they stay up forever" roll in.
Every so often we get another scandal on HN of the type "This horribly harmful content was posted on PLATFORM and PLATFORM didn't remove it fast enough". Augmenting the false-negative rate would make the problem worse.
Attackers can use automation to post their harmful content. There's no way defenders can keep up unless they use automation as well, no matter how decentralized they are.
This line of argument seems uncomfortably similar to "we need to ban encryption because terrorists and pedophiles can use it". The fact that bad people can occasionally benefit from something isn't a reason to not give it to the rest of us.
It actually can be. There's a continuum.
At one extreme are things like plans for nuclear or biological weapons. Nobody distributes those because terrorists really want them for horrible ends and they're of low utility, so we do without them.
At the other extreme are things like junk mail - we all just put up with that minor abuse of the system because having a cheap, flexible mail system is way better than not having junk mail.
Like I said, it's a spectrum, and sometimes bad people being able to abuse something is a good reason for everyone to forgo it.
My understanding is that how to build nuclear weapons is relatively well-known, and the only reason that terrorist groups don't have them is that they can't get their hands on the required raw materials.
In practice we want to pick the course of action that minimizes harm. Having your video demonetized is one kind of harm, having videos of harassment or revenge porn posted online is another.
The kind of people who say "we should never have false positives, ever" are never the people who will have to defend these positions once somebody gets harmed by them and kicks up a scandal.
Sorry...market share has nothing to do with their first amendment right to not host content that goes against their policies.
Fox News is the most watched cable news network. I wouldn't want the government forcing them to host people they don't want to host.
This is a straw-man; that's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I'm arguing that you can probably have both -- by using human moderators.
> Facebook removing a video is not censorship.
It is censorship. They're saying "no one can see this video on our platform." Do you really want to get in some silly semantic debate when you know full well what I meant? It seems you're being purposefully uncharitable.
Reminder: humans lack telepathy and so they depend on body language, tone, and word semantics to communicate.
That's a very extreme point of view.
You skipped right past calling the thing for what it is (censorship), past admitting it's a problem, and you're now arguing against a hypothetical extreme solution no-one has yet proposed.
Can we assume that you now agree it's censorship, and that it's a problem, and it's only the solution you proposed that bothers you?
unishark posted that they believe it's censorship, so I asked whether or not it'd be OK for any content to be removed if that's the case. Does unishark think that Facebook 'censoring' some content is actually OK?
I don't think it's censorship, and I think Facebook removing content is fine explicitly because it isn't censorious. So no, you can't assume that I now agree it's censorship, because it's not and I don't.
The idea that Facebook has a monopoly on video is weird. If someone wanted to grow an audience around their video content would you suggest they post the videos to Facebook to do it?
Maybe if your idea of censorship hinged on govt involvement it might fit a bit better. Though I'd still say we need to be able to talk about censorship by other organizations besides govt, and that the dictionary definition of the word covers this.
I thus generally view an attempt to refute an argument with some pedantic gotcha as a bad-faith responsse.
I would like to propose to not treat the pedantry counter as a sin. Instead think of it as a weak signal: the counter does not rank high on the hierarchy of disagreement. <https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-to-disagree-well-7-of-t...> If a strong counter could be made, we would use that one instead of the pedantry counter.
Your ISP doesn't moderate for you either.
New accounts are easy to create, but new communities are harder because you have to wait for members. Plus most of your moderators are free. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit only pays for people to moderate the default subs since advertisers and new users are more likely to see them.
I regularly hang out in several different communities of thousands of people, including this one. All of them, except the really small ones, have one or a few people who moderate the forums, and ways to report things that are posted. If someone posts a link to disturbing video to HN, it's going to disappear right quick; even if the source lives on. If I try out a community where there's a lot of disturbing videos posted, I'm going to stop going there; but other people might go there specifically because of those video links. If the videos are legal, that's their business and none of mine; I don't want to see it, and by avoiding their community, I won't.
Yeah, I concede this is a very hard problem (especially when advertisers are involved). And even worse, maybe it's not even worth it to solve. After all, if a minority x% of your creators are expendable to false DMCA takedowns because your market share is so huge, who cares?
Is it? I'd have imagined there's some ratio of 1 mod per N people for N not too small that would make things work. It might be more like 1:1K instead of the 1:1M (or whatever) that companies prefer, but is that genuinely unaffordable or is it just that companies don't like to pay for moderators?
I think mass media has some fundamental flaws that we havent accepted yet.
Edit: take out advertising in intellectual property and you would get rid of a bunch of bad actors and cobra effects.
However i see this as being a bit like the BBC problem: beleiving there is such a thing as being objective, there just isnt.
You can have a group of likeminded people who mostly agree and need a bit of moderation for when someones external bad day leaks into their interactions on the plaform. However if there is an underlying fundamental difference of opinion or goals then the moderators become just another weapon.
We need leaders not moderators. Moderators in difference of opinion just end up punishing the weak one way or another. Leaders show by example what we can aspire to, which in turn guides moderators in how to apply the rules.
If you have global platforms who are the leaders? What direction should they lead that works for china and the US?
What exactly is the problem you're pointing to? Are you saying Facebook couldn't afford to pay that many mods? Note that they don't have to be employees or in Facebook offices...
126,000 workers actually seems reasonable to find, the 2 million you'd need at a 1:1k ratio would be hard, I think. The pay is going to be bad, and the garbage you have to watch won't be worth it for most, but you still need a reasonably analytical person to decide if things definitely follow the rules, definitely don't follow the rules, or need to be escalated. And they need to be attentive, because videos can be totally normal and fine and then get abusive later.
[1] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-at-15-my-person...
I think the intent is to have better humans in the loop and to have a human appeal process.
Currently it seems like the human approved removal has no recourse and you’re just hosed.
Not sure the exact process at YouTube though.
And when you consider only flagged videos should *need* to be watched by a human.
User moderation via "flag as inappropriate" might work though.
Exactly, Slashdot works because of its transparency; the user can see, what was moderated down, and thus whether the moderation was done to something he doesn't want to see, or whether it is something that someone else doesn't want him to see.
But this isn't working as well as it should because the platform / advertising oligopoly is eating up everyone's revenue and using those funds to vertically and horizontally integrate everything under a handful of megacorp brands.
For as long as this consolidation (aka "scale") continues, content moderation will remain "unsolvable".
The thing is, you still have the scale problem even if you break up Youtube into a hundred different video streaming sites.
Say that Google would need to hire a million full-time moderators (in practice it's probably more) to ensure quality moderation for every video uploaded. If it's not sustainable for them to do that, then it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies to hire ten thousand moderators each to do the job.
This is especially bad because bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically. Unless platforms start pooling their moderation resources (in which case you're back to square one), having lots of small-scale platforms means that attackers can just upload the same thing on as many platforms as they can and hope it slip through the net in a few cases.
The only way we can stop that, as a society, is if we decide that any platform for content diffusion needs to factor in and charge the price of filtering that content from the get go. That means no more free uploads on Youtube; if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.
I think that would be a viable way for the ecosystem to go, but it would make it harder for small independent creators with no budget to get started.
No, PeerTube is a decentralized video platform with independent servers, which can work together.
EDIT: A quick search shows that I was asking the wrong question; in practice, there are servers dedicated to exclusively these kinds of videos.
You can't use made-up numbers to prove your point. Approx 800,000 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every day. Watching all of those in full at normal speed would require only 100,000 full time mods, but that's just about the dumbest way to go about it, so in reality it will be much less.
> it won't be sustainable for a hundred companies
> bad actors can just post the same content on multiple platforms automatically
You'll have to reconcile this fatalism with the myriad of smaller communities managing spam and moderation just fine. Millions (not "hundreds") of topical forums (incl. independent ones, and on platforms like reddit) are doing fine, often without full time or paid moderators.
> if you wanna upload something you have to pay a fee for moderators to look over your video and certify it as safe.
Since no one will opt-in to that willingly while free alternatives exist, you're essentially proposing state-mandated censorship. No thanks. I'd rather Facebook / Youtube just die if their consolidated asses can't keep up with what they created.
e.g. Imagine the argument was "Disposing of chemicals safely is a no-go at scale"
Businesses don't get to ignore negative externalities just because it's unprofitable
You could employ a little common sense when designing your product. Is it really wise for platforms like Facebook to allow anyone to start livestreaming unrestricted? I would argue no, at the very least they should be taking measures to minimise the blast radius should someone decide to walk outside and start shooting people.
I think the only difference is that politicians don't even pretend to care about the complaints of moderators on small forums.
With that in mind, consider that this "failure" of scale may be less of a bug and more of a feature as far as the platforms are concerned. All the big players HATE the Internet as it originally existed. All those independent voices talking all over the place were difficult or impossible to monetize, and the legal hazard of trying to do business near anything resembling a truly free discussion forum is a nightmare. Far better to do away with all that pesky multi-directional communication and go back to the good old days: big company make product, big company market product, little people buy product. No need for discussion or community. That just gets in the way.
Maybe, if your lords are feeling generous, they'll give you a comment section where you can talk about how great product is. Any other posts will of course be scrubbed.
It's a cycle that's been going on since at least the 19th century (via pamphlets), and I don't see it stopping any time soon.
You don't want anyone else actually reading the great unwashed's comments, though!
[1] https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/mp-fears...
There was a story on here yesterday I don't think many people saw, about a book being rejected from Apple Books because it contained the word "Leanpub"! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205541
Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, my opinions are my own, yadda yadda.
Remember when a bunch of people (and Googlers) threw a fit about Project Dragonfly, Google's "aborted" attempt at a censored search engine for China?
Now that it is widely known and accepted that Google routinely manipulates and censors search results in Western countries for political and anti-competitive ends, where is the outrage now? Where are the walkouts at Google campus?
If Google ever did "love the Internet as it originally existed", the people who lent that air to the company are long gone, replaced by new people who look at the Great Firewall of China with envy.
My bet is his voice triggered the system.
> I'm arguing that you can probably have both -- by using human moderators.
I don't think human moderators can review 720K hours of video per day. (on YouTube) You would need to hire >100,000 moderators to continuously watch videos all day and have some redundancy in reviews, then 1,000s of supervisors to make sure moderators are doing their job correctly. (almost impossible when you review videos all day with no break) Let's not even get into comment moderation...
I'm not sure about this. I believe there are automated systems and shadow bans on HN (not entirely sure how they work). There's certainly community moderation via flagging and downvoting, which is essentially how the FB video was removed as well.
I certainly don't blame him. I know my own mind and I'm certain I wouldn't fare any better in his situation. I think most people would be unprepared for the psychology of becoming Internet-famous, of having their opinion continually validated by a hungry audience.
In fact it's genuinely fascinating to me when occasionally you see an individual who remains seemingly unaffected by celebrity, psychologically unaffected by their thought-leader status in a large community. I'd actually pick Linus Sebastian—of all people—as be a canonical example of this. Whether it's sincere or incredible acting skills, the stratospheric growth of his channel hasn't made him any more insufferable.
The few people who can nagivate this perfectly truly shine in the world of YouTube. (The Slow Mo Guys is another example. And weirdly, I'd have to give a nod to Project Farm as well, for content that seems entirely unaffected by channel success.)
A lot of my favourite creators fall somewhere between these extremes. (e.g. Technology Connections, Mark Rober, savagegeese, Engineering Explained.) Not unscathed by their popularity, but seem to be able to cope with the mindfuck thus far.
I changed a lot in my life as well at a similar age. Louis is certainly someone who always likes to work on hard (but not unsolveble) problems. What he does with right to repair, is just yet another one of those. This is just trying to repair the underlying cause for a lot of troubles reapir shops are or will be in.
I guess the only impact internet fame might have had is that he now sees this as a problem that can actually be solved (rather than one that he as yet another small repair shop owner cannot solve).
...the dude is 32 (born in -88). So that means he was in his late 20's when he started his channel.
Why does he look like a 50 year old IT veteran who has seen it all, twice :D
The reason you become famous in the first place is because you do a good job being creative with the possibility space in your present environment. Once you become famous that environment and possibility space changes, and you are forced to chose between being grounded which may mean choosing not to use the new superpowers given to you, or to continue doing what you have always done with your new capabilities...
What puzzles me is how can anybody not be sure about the right to repair.
Dealing with bad actors in public forums is not as hard as tech companies would want you to believe. This is evident, because we do it today. Its our system of courts.
Take any platform, and implement a simple e-court system with juries, being random users from the network. The injured party can effectively e-sue , and the pool of randomly users must all agree that abuse took place. This takes care of " No more frivolous takedowns.
This also takes care of the pesky catch-all ToS. Platform no longer needs to define abuse. Instead, we take approach of Justice Steward: "I know it when I see it"
Juries participating get rewards (badges, recognition, opportunities as judges / advocates, etc)
The reason companies do not implement such a system is because it takes power away from them (management, staff) and gives it to the users.
That's precisely why such a system would be a winner.
It does mean that you won't be able to act on anything except the grossest of abuse. Given the hyper-partisan divide in America, you'd never get 10 people to agree on any case with even a whiff of politics. People will not vote on "is this abusive", they'll vote on "do I agree with this".
But, hey it's not all bad. Want some viewers for your video? Here's a growth hacking tip: Just have a friend file an abuse complaint against it, and you'll get it sent into the jury rotation pool.
You are not describing something that doesn't happen in real life. Jury pools are introduced to a summary of the case to precisely ask jurors to recuse themselves if the content of said case is too X. Ejury adjudication would make this incredibly simple via flagging system. "X user has stated this is animal cruelty, and the algo concurrs". So you know what you are dealing with before anyone hits play.
2) RE: No one wants the work. Real-life Jury pools consistently have 100+ candidates for a final 12. E-juries are much better because they can actually scale and can cycle much faster. The world has 7B people. With the right incentives, you can find 10 or so people to take a case on.
Plus, you are forgetting that there are also real penalties for losing a case that can act to fend off the undesirables. For example, you could make it so that losing a case means the platform discloses your IP. Makes all your private postings/messages public. Open up the logs of use. Take your pick. There's a million ways to punish degenerates which now do not happen because algos decide and they have such a high false positive rate, to punish would be doubling down on a failed strategy.
3) RE: No agreement except for gross abuse. I have to disagree. 98%+ of people would be in agreement that death, CSAM, animal cruelty etc are offenses that should be dealt with. You already have consensus there. Anything else is in the spectrum of spam / hate / etc. Yet, if it is not beyond reasonable doubt, then its probably not gross.
4) Growth hacking: You seem to forget there are penalties for false accusations in real life. This is no different. If your friend wants to lose access to his own account, he can go right ahead and report a video for the 10 extra views....
As for your idea on "real penalties"... Somebody posts abusive material, and as a penalty the platform would distribute more of their material? Harsh. Oh, I sure hope they don't close my throwaway account created from a VPN IP. How could I ever replace it with a new one?
People doing this work professionally get psychological counseling for it. You simply could not subject normal users to it. Not morally, not legally, and not if you want to actually run a business.
I don't know what kind of support the judicial systems give juries who have to view that kind of material. But at least in those cases there are real consequences if the defendant is found guilty. Not so on the Internet.
Now imagine periodically reviewing videos like this being your 'duty'. In addition to scarring your users for life, they'd be leaving in droves, and you'd be inundated in lawsuits.
2) This already happens in real life. I am sure there are mothers serving in jury pools about the murder of a toddler by a parent. The difference is that there are a number of things one could do to manage user preferences in such cases. Also, content would not be as pervasive as implied if penalties are effective at making borderline actors self-moderate, and permanently removing bad actors with real consequences (IP banning, public logs, etc).
Most people at these company are fine people. There are forces (revenue, survival instanct, compliance, network effect, competition, being a monopol is nice, ...) that drive these companies. PayPal, Google, Facebook are the end state of the current forces in the market.
You do need to remove one or several of those (e.g. revenue driven) to end up in a different end state.
Also this completely breaks down when you start talking about having a jury agree on what is/isnt hate speech or something similar. You are never going to get an agreement on that.
2) That's exactly the point. If a group of random people can't agree that some post is hate speech, then its not hate speech beyond reasonable doubt.
Real juries have a selection process that it supposed to weed out biased individuals. Real juries have judges that steer them towards a particular way of viewing evidence. Real juries are forbidden from doing their own research, and can only passively listen to lawyers make arguments.
Its a requirement in real life. If you try making it a requirement to use your platform, I dont see why any users would stay. I think users will overwhelmingly prefer to have the content curated for them, so they dont have to look at child porn and beheadings every week for the opportunity to use social media.
> 2) That's exactly the point. If a group of random people can't agree that some post is hate speech, then its not hate speech beyond reasonable doubt.
This sounds like an incredibly quick way to make your platform just a collection of the worst parts of the internet. A place with a TOS determined by the users where you need an overwhelming majority[1] to convict anything isnt going to last long with people who just wanna share some pictures with friends.
[1] Your post says unanimous but Ill give it the benefit of the doubt and assume thats not literal, since getting a unanimous decision is essentially impossible on the internet.
This is about more gray areas, like should we ban this Joe Rogan episode? I would personally spend a few minutes each week going through an e-jury if that would help scrub the communities I like on reddit. Now reddit is a sterile ecochamber, it could become a much more engaged platfom, like it used to be.
You don't need agreement, just consensus. You don't need unanimity. Bias can be analyzed handily enough across multiple user "judgements".
Basically people got a random selection of moderated comments and got to choose from different options.
If a mod's work was constantly off-base, they would not get mod rights again.
> Juries participating get rewards (badges, recognition, opportunities as judges / advocates, etc)
There are also external rewards that need to be considered. For example, being a juror because you want to silence someone. I wouldn't put it past 4chan to try something like that.
> The injured party can effectively e-sue
Without any kind of cost or risk, this will get abused. Remember that it takes 1 person to make a report, and 12 people to form the jury. It doesn't take much to flood the "court", and then there's effectively no moderation.
> The reason companies do not implement such a system is because it takes power away from them (management, staff) and gives it to the users.
I don't think it's directly about power. It's largely about advertising money. They need to make sure advertisers are okay with the ads being run next to the content. Advertisers will not care that a jury voted to keep a racist tirade.
how it works: once a player has received enough reports for suspicious behaviour (i.e., cheating), or bad behaviour (griefing, throwing, etc.), a replay of the match is submitted to tens of other players. these players review the "demo", decide on the likelihood of the "suspect" being guilty of those offenses. if all reviewers come to a unanimous decision, then the suspect receives a ban.
the system is thoroughly abused[1] by hackers/cheaters who are able to spam reports for players they don't like, and by controlling hundreds, if not thousands, of bot accounts, can reach unanimous verdicts that no normal person would decide, inflicting bans on innocent players.
Hidden reliability scores should aid the classification of "judges". Misclassify often? Get downprioritized. As CS is a paid game, the typical issue of mass account creation to game this should be at least slightly mitigated.
Anticheat has to be defense in depth.
defense in depth, indeed: Overwatch is one of three systems, the other two being VAC, and Trust. the former being more traditional cheat detection (which, empirically, is not effective at all), and the latter being an observation of a user’s interaction on the entire steam platform, amongst other things, to determine a “trust factor”. anecdotally, myself and many others can tell you that this is also ineffective.
for what it’s worth, 2020 and by the looks of it, 2021, will go down in CSGO’s history as the years that the cheaters won.
The issue with CSGO was not that the methods were ineffective, but that it's a constant war. The moment the devs stop fighting, the cheaters can and will most definitely win. Valve gave up, so CSGO is cheater infested. FaceIt didn't, and thus is a better environment.
For paid games, there's a fun addon there. If cheaters have to buy a new account every time a ban hits, in theory, effective anticheat can subsidize it's own cost. The catch being that they'll then start using hacked accounts to cheat on.
Then 2FA comes in... Such is the rabbit hole of anticheat, there's always a next step. Somehow, cheating at games is a prime objective to far too many people.
faceit/esea isn’t much better. and i suspect it’s only better at all because of the higher barrier to entry.
as for MFA - Trust takes this into account in determining its score.
to stay on topic here, i think what i was originally trying to say was, yes, having humans in the mix for self-moderation is a good idea in principle. in practise, it’s easy to manipulate because it’s very hard, potentially even impossible, to determine if you actually have a human using the machine. well, except in china, i suppose. but i don’t think we want to live in that world :)
I'm pretty sure every layer of defense you can think of, they've tried.
- Machine learning to spot obvious cases? Check.
- Federated moderation? Check.
- Various trust schemes to weigh accounts based on how much they payed, whether they cheated in the past, etc? Check.
The only thing I don't think they've tried too much is sending false/stale game data in cases where they know the client has no way to know otherwise (eg lying about an enemy's position when the player has no way to see the enemy).
It's an arms race and it's hard to stay ahead at scale.
(though I'm not actually sure I trust accounts of how prevalent cheating is; I haven't had that many cheaters in my own games, and a lot of complaints I've seen come from either free users or people who admitted to cheating themselves, which is what I'd expect to see if Trust Factor worked; though it's a crap deal for free users)
AFAICT social media replaced "the established networks" a decade ago.
1) jury duty is maybe 1 day per 1-2 years in America for most people, and it's still widely disliked. In my experience, it's the most reliable place you can go and find adults acting like children who want to get out of school early. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but I am saying that most people don't like expending their time on it.
2) A possible response to point 1) is that the frictions involved in virtual jury duty are much lower than those of real-world jury duty. But, this cuts both ways. One reason our legal system works is that people can't just automatically spam it with garbage claims (well, they can, but it requires spending time and resources). This defense doesn't apply when the whole thing is online. Heuristics for automatic defense of the jury system then run into the same problems of automatic moderating.
Overall, I agree that it's unfortunate that automated moderating makes so many high-profile screw-ups. But I'm also confused by how many people are sure that it's because tech companies are ignoring obvious solutions.
So I report the profiles many times (profiles with nudes, explicit pictures, etc), and half of the time, I get a response that they do not violate FB policies. I am talking abut pictures of assholes, tits, etc.
And no, it is not that I am horrified of seeing that, is that if I want to see that I go to other pages.
I honestly believe the FB UI for reviewers only shows the picture and not the caption, I can't imagine any other explanation.
It’ll get better when Facebook chooses to deal with this with more accuracy. Until then, any actions that go beyond basic protection of our groups is simply tilting at windmills.
No. “Abusive” is not a fact claim.
Facebook deliberately created a set of rules/measures to determine abusive content, specifically such that they couldn’t be accused of being arbitrary, or opinion-driven. So their rules specifically ensure that their determinations are fact-based not opinion-based. If they determine that content has broken their rules on “abusive content” it seems pretty fact-based.
So labeling content as having broken their rules on abusive content is literally making a fact claim.
No, not in the sense required for libel law.
> If they say that the video breaks their rules on abusing content, it goes away from opinion and more into fact.
That would arguably be true if their standards were remotely objective; they are not.
> Facebook deliberately created a set of rules/measures to determine abusive content, specifically such that they couldn’t be accused of being arbitrary, or opinion-driven
Whether or not that is the intent of the rules, the rules are opinion-driven on their face.
> So their rules specifically ensure that their determinations are fact-based not opinion-based
No, they don’t. Have you read their rules?
> . If they determine that content has broken their rules on “abusive content” it seems pretty fact-based.
Really?
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The following behavior isn't allowed on Facebook:
Posting things that don't follow the Facebook Community Standards (ex: threats, hate speech, graphic violence).
Using Facebook to bully, impersonate or harass anyone.
Abusing Facebook features (ex: sending friend requests to many people you don't know). Overusing features could make other people feel uncomfortable or unsafe. As a result, we have limits in place to limit the rate at which you can use features. Learn more aboutthese limits.
--- [0]
Seems like a whole lot of opinion in there to me, even before lookong at the Community Standards (incorporated by reference as they’ve indicated anything bot following them can be labeled “abusive”.)
But let’s look at them [1]...and find there are no fact-oriented rules ar all, but a statement that “...when we limit expression, we do it in service of one or more of the following values:” followed by a list of vague value statements without factual criteria.
The only ones I company I can't imagine is doing this is Google. They have an Awful reputation. Their Fruit counterpart, Nintendo, Samsung, and more are suspiciously positive at anti consumer news.
I tried to do a whois on those domains, but it seems they’re managed by an intermediary and anonymized.
I wouldn’t call it abusive and shouldn’t be banned, but it’s not without issues either. Most people find him great, perhaps something must be misjudged by me.
Of course, speaking or writing with nothing BUT appeals to emotion is vacuous and cynical, and the horde of youtube grifters that have sprung up to make money off getting people wound up are trash. But unlike them, Rossmann actually has well-considered content behind his passion, not just hot air.
> Sometimes abuse and badness are necessary
Sure, but we tend to only support this argument as far as it echoes in our echo chambers. We've silenced right-wing social media and a bunch of other "abuse and badness" and HN gives a green ticket to it. Some of it is truly horrifying, but there was a lot of collateral damage to freedom of expression and speech.
I don't support badness and abuse. Protesting for a cause is more about gaining support for the cause and convincing people that are against it. It is a "pull" model, not "push". By pushing harder, you're creating more echo chambers of vile, contemptful vigilente justice damaging the original cause and making no progress at it. Self defeating.
I also completely disagree that we should ever sugercoat our language when addressing practices that have clear malice and greed behind them. Prioritising the feelings of some millionaire/billionaire shareholder over the thousands to millions of customers being exploited and short-changed smells of messed up priorities frankly.
The only people this approach genuinely "pushes" away are a group that you cannot expect to act in good faith in the first place - the companies deliberately obstructing the right to repair. You don't ask them nicely to do something they have zero profit motivation towards. You force them by enacting legislation or creating enough of a backlash that they calculate that supporting Right to Repair is better for their bottom line.
This is true, fair enough. The incentives aren't aligned here for big corporations. My points about protesting were more generic and beyond R2R initiative. You make good points that being nice to large corporations isn't going to achieve anything. But, would getting angry do anything? I am not quite convinced because regular Joe is going to buy that shiny piece of unrepairable equipment. We're just so used to throw-away culture, problem is much deeper. Both - businesses as well as consumers are to blame. Unfortunately, the slice of consumers that care about R2R is vanishingly small.
I also don't buy that consumers are really to blame for this anymore than somebody born in a society that believes in the divine rights of kings is to blame for being a monarchist. Corporations and their friends in media and government influence or outright manufacture the overwhelming majority of the culture that is projected onto people. Is it really a surprise then that most people have internalised the precise world view and expectations of their purchases that is convenient to companies?