Facebook now warning users about exposure to “harmful extremist content” | Hacker News Reader

Facebook now warning users about exposure to “harmful extremist content”

newshub.co.nz

63 pointsFreeSpeech67 comments

> Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment.

Anyone else find it weird that Facebook is calling themselves a "violent group"?

Joking aside, I "love" how the language in the warning pretends that Facebook is a perfectly neutral party here, in no way responsible for what content floats to the top of people's feeds.

> You can take action now to protect yourself and others.

Yes. That action is deleting your Facebook account.

> Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment

"Political parties, foreign states that oppose democracy, and mercenary corporations all give us money for a chance to manipulate your anger and disappointment. While we at F-Book just mine your personal data."

Re-written for clarity.

Active vs passive voice in media is a way of avoiding responsibility. It shifts the subject from those who transgressed to the instrument of transgression, or to the person wronged.

What it should read is "Natalie, Facebook may have exposed you to harmful extremist content". Instead the passive voice subverts Facebook's role in deciding which content is served. It's like the content just magically shows up. A lot like how bullets or rockets also magically show up on their own in other stories.

> I "love" how the language in the warning pretends that Facebook is a perfectly neutral party here

I saw people's screenshots of the "Help" section where Facebook elaborates on the subject of "violent groups". I'd say the language there is noticeably skewed towards the liberal left (if there is still any meaning left in those labels).

Do you mean that from your perspective the language there is skewed toward painting the left as a violent group, or that the language there is skewed in support of the left?

In support of the left, definitely. I saw a section on immigration, which I would think aligns closely with what Democrats are preaching.

[Sober, well-researched article about the dangers of pervasive social media that calls for strong government regulation]

“This link has been associated with harmful extremist content. Are you sure you wish to proceed?”

100% agree - let’s not forget that at the start of the pandemic the social media platforms called the lab leak theory an extreme conspiracy and some social platforms blocked links, now it’s one of the leading theories, so clearly and unsurprisingly these policies have already resulted in legitimate discourse being blocked.

I think I use the scientific method a lot, and dismissing a possible theory as "extremist conspiracy" before having all the answers is very unscientific, especially if the other theory (zoonotic spread) doesn't have bulletproof evidence yet. The fact that some scientists signed up to the zoonotic theory and dismissed the lab leak theory is weird, and the fact that social media banned the links means their censorship is flawed.

Then again, too many idiots think proof means "The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, therefore they're hiding the lab leak, therefore the lab leak theory is real, QED". That sort of disinformation does deserve a ban.

Now watch this comment get downvoted for... not following the herd?

> Then again, too many idiots think proof means "The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, therefore they're hiding the lab leak, therefore the lab leak theory is real, QED". That sort of disinformation does deserve a ban.

"The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, which makes it more likely that they're hiding the lab leak, which makes it more likely that the lab leak theory is true" isn't that far off but seems much more reasonable.

Should we ban people for making strawman arguments, or should we steelman their argument in response?

> which makes it more likely that they're hiding the lab leak, which makes it more likely that the lab leak theory is true.

Geezus Christ, just as I'm talking about scientific thinking and lack of it. No and no! It's possible, but they're not more likely!

Why they don't want Western investigators free reign investigating the lab? Imagine if the WHO asked the US to let in Chinese investigators in their virology labs. Maybe they're hiding bio-weapons research, or cancer research that they want bragging rights for, but it doesn't automatically mean there's the "Covid smoking gun" being hidden there. It's possible, but them being cagey doesn't make it more possible.

It sounds like you've misunderstood the statement.

They're not saying the lab-leak is more likely than not given the CCP likes to hide things. They're saying the lab-leak becomes relatively more likely after conditioning on the information that the CCP likes to hide things.

That's completely reasonable if we think the tendency to hide info is going to asymmetrically impact the investigation into a leak more than an investigation into zoonotic origins. It's also reasonable even if we think they're going to hide things whether or not it really was a leak, since the impact can still be asymmetric.

If someone has a track record of hiding stuff, that fact makes it more likely [0] they are actually hiding something. It doesn’t definitively prove they are hiding anything in particular; something being more likely is compatible with it being false. And saying “more likely” is saying nothing about how much more likely; it could just be slightly more likely.

I don’t see how saying that is a “lack of scientific thinking”. I think that criticism is just false.

[0] “more likely” is talking about epistemic probability, Bayesian probability

> If someone has a track record of hiding stuff, that fact makes it more likely [0] they are actually hiding something.

That's a tautology. So what, what if someone came with a theory that the virus comes from meteorite that people from this lab had been researching? Does their cageyness mean more likely that the meteorite theory is true? Geez...

> So what, what if someone came with a theory that the virus comes from meteorite that people from this lab had been researching?

The two scenarios are not the same, and denying a plausible scenario isn’t the same as denying an unplausible scenario, particularly when there are negative incentives.

Is your argument really comparing the theory that a coronavirus that hopped species might have come from the lab next door which was doing research on how coronaviruses hopped species with it coming in on a meteorite?

A better example would be if a giant smouldering crater suddenly appeared, and the Chinese government started saying it wasn’t a meteor and holes sometimes just appear because of tectonic activity, while at the same time blocking other nations scientists from seeing the crater.

You're attempting a reductio ad absurdum but it's not valid because the meteorite has a tiny prior probability of being true, whereas the lab leak doesn't have such a tiny prior due to historical precedent of it happening a number of times, even if it is much less likely to be true as the zoonotic origin explanation in the case of COVID.

Thank you. I think this discussion makes more sense if one has a basic understanding of Bayesianism – one starts with a prior probability, one then has various pieces of evidence and associated conditional probabilities than one uses to update that probability, and then one arrives at a posterior probability after updating based on those pieces of evidence. I was talking about the conditional probability for one particular piece of evidence; I was never saying anything about the prior or posterior probability. Obviously you, and others, get this, but it seems bellyfullofbac doesn't.

>Now watch this comment get downvoted for... not following the herd?

Come on man, don't be like that. You're basically asking people to give you upvotes.

> now it’s one of the leading theories

I think the consensus is yet to move on this one. In a recent text I saw by someone who was trying to channel the majority opinion of the scientific community, they were calling it the less likely possibility, or something to that effect. I believe it's only in the public opinion that it became one of the leading theories, because the media suddenly decided that it was going to allow people to talk about it, and Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert...

That's just one out of many more events the mainstream media has been disregarding or lying about. It may be extreme to call the mainstream media propaganda but then again, it may not.

When people say mainstream media what do they mean? Our Swiss media houses never really excluded any Theorie that could get milked for clicks. I mean why would they?

Facebook did censor a lot, but Facebook can't be considered media.

Edit:// isn't it more the lack of willingness to explore outside your bubble before you form an opinion?

> It may be extreme to call the mainstream media propaganda but then again, it may not.

Warranted or not, they have duck-typed themselves into it.

> let’s not forget that at the start of the pandemic the social media platforms called the lab leak theory an extreme conspiracy and some social platforms blocked links

That was because back then the people spreading the lab leak theory were almost exclusively Alex Jones-level or worse crackpots.

But the aggressiveness with which this theory was dismissed and ridiculed is unbelievable. In the beginning i had often to double-check that I got the context right - that in fact it's about an accidental leak, not intended, but still treated like some tinfoil hat preaching, a conspiracy theory. If anything, that kind of response could push me to believing conspiracies i otherwise wouldn't. I lost a lot of respect for the general population and even the crowd here.

I think the issue with the early messaging on the lab-leak theory is that it was bundled with anti-immigrant messaging, which was somehow presented as an alternative to actually doing anything at all about controlling the spread of the virus.

Which is to say, it appeared to me that the messaging was along the lines of

* There's a virus, but it's no big deal and it's going to disappear, and you're an idiot if you wear a mask

* However, the virus was started in a lab in China

* Therefore, we should put more resources toward border security and remove avenues to citizenship and work visas

* And people who appear to be of asian descent should be harassed on the street for good measure

If someone gives you a message that's 75% bullshit, it can be difficult to sort out the other 25%.

Some people certainly spread such messages, but on HN and other places in early 2020, I saw many reasonable, scientific-minded, likely left-leaning people discuss the possibility soberly.

My own stance shifted a bit due to an early/mid-2020 HN thread, where I kind of naively assumed there was already a conclusive consensus around a zoonotic origin and that the sequence didn't indicate any human meddling. I presented that side of it, and also how the presence of the lab has to be considered in a Bayesian sense; e.g. what if the lab was built there due to an existing concentration of new viruses or virus-carrying species in that area. After reading some thoughtful replies, I realized it was pretty irresponsible and not completely rational of me to dismiss the theory out of hand, and ended up editing my post and have been continuously considering and weighing all of the circumstantial evidence on either side since then. (At the moment I'm pretty much agnostic or 50/50 on it.)

The problem is that anything unorthodox is inevitably going to have lots of crazy and ill-intentioned people associated with it, serving as ideal "weak men" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...).

In some cases deliberately, but usually inadvertently and due to bias, those positions will be painted with the brush of the craziest, least credible, and most assholish of the sources. I'm an armchair conspiracy theory (attempted) debunker so I've seen this and have tried to keep myself from doing this many times, because it's actually a failure mode that's not as severe as but not quite unlike the pervasive confirmation bias of conspiracy theorists themselves. This kind of pattern matching often does work well, which is what makes it even more epistemologically fraught when applied to new, controversial events and ideas that are developing in real-time.

Great example of a ad hominem fallacy. Well done. :-)

Pretty sure Alex Jones has stated in court, in his own defense that everything he says is for "entertainment" has has no basis in truth or reality. So by his own admission, you can't trust what he says. You can be entertained though and apparently that's enough for many Americans.

Rachel Maddow has done the same, but I know way too many people who trust what she says.

I don't watch Rachel Maddow but I certainly wouldn't trust her opinion (being a TV news personality) on such important topics as COVID where she (and every other news personality) has zero qualifications.

Can you share the link to her testimony?

Her defense in a defamation lawsuit was that she was using hyperbole in offering an opinion. She's not the only commentary show host to use that defense, but she's the most notable one on the left that a lot of people like to overlook when pointing out the exaggerations and hyperbole on the right.

https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2019/10/21/rachel-maddo...

She was also the first to use the defense, i.e. before Tucker Carlson used it. I mention this because it's a fact that people often overlook when discrediting extremist comments from Carlson like "the NSA read my emails."

Does this actually happen?

If you try to apply ML to this problem.

Considering the fact that they're fact-checking stupid memes, I wouldn't be surprised.

Instead, they could just stop aggressively pushing extreme and upsetting content with their algorithms to increase engagement. I know people getting really depressed thinking all their friends have become extremists. In actuality, that’s just the only content that is being pushed to them in their feeds (and likewise, the only content that their friends are getting pushed as well)

Really miss the days when feeds were just chronological lists of posts from your friends/family. No re-shares, suggested content, etc...

Ironically providing this and just charging like $1/mo would be far more effective than labeling content as extreme or not.

I miss when there was no feed. You visit their page if you wanted to know what someone was up to

That's really the problem here. Instead of just the content that I specifically signed up for, I constantly get pushed for things I don't.

Why should they. They are in business to make money, and cannot effectively self-police. Imagine a time, way back after WWII when fascism almost took over Europe and destroyed democracy, when the grown-ups in charge took responsibility for fighting against intolerance and propaganda by carefully regulating communication through a government agency. For better and sometimes worse, but mostly better, this agency created LAWS that prevented the distribution of propaganda and obviously false and unbalanced news through regulation of the broadcast media, specific rules about what could be considered 'news', and the fairness doctrine. These grownups cleverly called the agency the Federal Communications Commission, whose job was not restricted to just the airwaves: it was to protect the people from hate groups, harmful extremist content, yes communist propaganda, and many other unbalanced or biased sources of information.

I can’t imagine anyone who’s susceptible to radicalization seeing that message and and having any kind of lightbulb go off.

Do you think they really want to help people or is it more likely they are trying to get ahead of being broken up or overtaken by a government appointed authority

I'll probably weight that warning as "might be ml interesting". Seeing that what I like (the old Web) is dying a slow death under the weight of modern privatised censorship, what they're marking as bad might become signal, of sorts.

And the first, relatively mild warnings on cigarette packages probably didn't convince many to quit, nor did posting calorie counts on fast food menus make everyone switch to salads. But hopefully it's the start of a drumbeat where this type of content becomes less and less acceptable in society.

It's not the perfect analogy of course, but I think the solution to divisive, negative, nasty online content is largely a social one not a technological one.

I'm thinking it might have the opposite effect for anyone that doesn't trust Facebook

I don't know anybody who trusts facebook (the company).

But I do know a few people who are all to eager to trust everything that gets posted on facebook, and a sizable chunk of these people would indeed take such an "extremist warning" by facebook to mean that "they" are trying to hide things from the public.

All of my right-wing friends and acquaintances who received this message mocked it and took it as more evidence of Facebook's bias, so I'd say it was inversely effective.

It will reinforce views.

You can't really reason with True Believers, especially not if you're someone they already deeply distrust.

Either that or Facebook is biased, and it is completely reasonable to mock them.

IMO it will further antagonize them and the first reaction whoever sees this will be to go further down the rabbit hole.

I see it more as a way of nudging, herding the cattle so to speak, to get people thinking in the way that big tech wants and finds useful. This is not the same thing as discouraging extremism. By any measure, the invasion and monetisng of peoples privacy like Facebook do is extreme.

There should be PSAs warning users about exposure to Facebook and other ML curated feeds.

Shows me "the content is not available in yr region"..., Poland here.

https://archive.is/g3Tox

Cue supporting taxing Tech companies and protectionism from US Big Tech becoming "extremist".

Yet another example of a deeply patronizing stance on the part of those who deem 'ordinary people' too stupid to make their own judgments. They behave like some in the monarchy who spout questionable opinions but never engage in public debate. A similar mindset was evident in those senior EU officials in 2016 who privately told John Longworth, Chairman of the UK Independent Business Network that they were shocked British non-graduates were allowed to vote in the Brexit referendum.

> A similar mindset was evident in those senior EU officials in 2016 who privately told John Longworth, Chairman of the UK Independent Business Network that they were shocked British non-graduates were allowed to vote in the Brexit referendum.

Considering the results ( Brexit), and on what the campaign for that result was run on ( flaming shit and disinformation, like their wonderful slogans), can you blame him? It was an extremely complex topic, dangerously oversimplified by people with very questionable at best credentials and motives ( Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson), who lied and made empty impossible promises ( like a Norway style deal but with full judicial independence). Such a question, with such variable outcomes, should have never been asked to ordinary people. Ffs, many polls and trends showed many people didn't have a clue what it is that the EU does and what it means leaving it, even after the vote.

What should have happened in your opinion? I can’t tell if you’re saying ordinary people shouldn’t have been asked such an important question, or what.

The trolls shouldn't have been fed, UKIP should have been left to implode under their idiocy and racism.

Most people aren't experts in the tons of subjects required to properly appreciate the gravity of the vote ( not to mention that the "leave" option had vastly different suboptions nobody got to vote on). Ffs, nobody had any idea what to do with the Irish question, and there is simply no answer there.

Ramming through a dangerous situation on the basis of a very thin margined non-binding referendum was very weird.

Welcome to direct democracy. If a referendum doesn't represent the people, nothing does.

Democracy, am I right?

Paternalism, that's exactly that we have been suffering since before we were born, and it's increasing. I think the Internet has given ways for individuals to get information so easily that there are now aggressive restrictions put in place. Of course in the form of self gratifications, sense of duties;fb is here to protect us.

I find these moves good, they show their cards, more and more people will hopefully start questioning the paternalism and finally questions all these taxes we are forced to pay as well. Our bank accounts or at least transactions that may be frozen any time due to merely suspect acticity. The need for a business specific license for each and everything one can do, even to basically cut bread in half for customers. Border controls not allowing us to import/export a gazillion products for x and y security reasons, and, i will say it, the near obligation to take some vaccine shots to be able to move around the globe.

The people whose attitudes don't align with Facebook will recognize this paternalism for what it is. Those people whose attitude align with Facebook won't. That's been my experience with these kinds of things.

Marjorie Taylor Greene got introduced to it, how ironic.

https://i.redd.it/b04lfdm9su871.png

Enrage and Engage yields too much profit for big social media to do anything real to curtail "harmful extremist content".

I've seen Normie conservative and libertarian friends posting screenshots of this. I wouldn't be surprised if the anti establishment left are getting the same thing.

Facebook is getting into activism, you should be very worried.

Facebook has been into activism for a long time. They are just being slightly more obvious about it now.

But, yeah, "worried" is appropriate.

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