You ask - isn't moderation the problem they're trying to solve. This gets to the heart of the matter. What is the actual problem Facebook are facing here?
I read the WSJ article and the quotes from the internal documents. To me the articles and documents are discussing this problem: their content moderation is very unreliable (10% error rate according to Zuck) therefore they have created a massive whitelist of famous people who would otherwise get random takedowns which would expose the arbitrary and flaky nature of the system. By their own telling this is unfair, unequal, runs counter to the site's founding principles and has led to bad things like lying to their own oversight board.
It's clear from this thread that some HN posters are reading it and seeing a different problem: content moderation isn't aggressive enough and stupid decisions, like labelling a discussion of paint as racist, should just apply to everyone without exception.
I think the actual problem is better interpreted the first way. Facebook created XCheck because their content moderation is horrifically unreliable. This is not inherent to the nature of automated decision making, as Gmail spam filtering shows - it works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics. Rather, it's inherent to the extremely vague "rules" they're trying to enforce, which aren't really rules at all but rather an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left. But most people aren't activists. If they just rolled back their content policies to what they were seven or eight years ago, the NYT set would go berserk, but most other people wouldn't care much or would actively approve. After all, they didn't care before and Facebook's own documents show that their own userbase is making a sport out of mocking their terrible moderation.
Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments". There could be nothing more on-topic, as you must know from reading the article. The XCheck system exists to stop celebrities and politicians from being randomly whacked by an out of control auto-moderator system. A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents. You can read the article for free if you sign in - that's how I did it.
I’m not sure that I would consider any site that contains virally-spreading racism and falsehoods to be “fine,” but that’s just me, I guess. Even HN is full of BS, but at least it’s contained to comments and can’t be republished with the click of a button.
Facebook's problem is that it has given in to the activist class that feels simply not going there is insufficient. Instead they feel a deep need to try and control people through communication and content platforms. This was historically understood to be a bad idea, exactly because the demands of such people are limitless. "Virally spreading falsehoods" is no different to the Chinese government's ban on "rumours", it's a category so vague that Facebook could spend every last cent they have on human moderators and you'd still consider the site to be filled with it. Especially because it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false: that's the root cause of this WSJ story! Their moderators keep disagreeing with each other and making embarrassing decisions, which is why they have a two-tier system where they try and protect famous people who could make a big noise from the worst of their random "falsehood detecting machine".
Edit:
>it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false
I can't agree with this, all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't, otherwise they have nothing to act on. It would be more convincing if you could suggest ways their moderators could resolve these disputes and determine what is actually true, because what you're suggesting sounds to me like they should just decide that everything is false all the time.
Sure, and I don't! But this thread isn't about my problems or even your problems, it's about Facebook's problems.
"How are they controlling people if you acknowledge that going there is voluntary?"
People go there because they think they are seeing content shared by their friends, by people they follow and so on. In fact they are seeing a heavily filtered version of that designed to manipulate their own opinions. That's the whole point of the filtering: with the exception of where they label articles as 'fact checked', content that is politically unacceptable to them just vanishes and people aren't told it happens, so they can remain unaware of it. Like any system of censorship, right?
"all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't"
No, they have to decide that for a very narrow range of issues they've chosen to explicitly specialize in, and organizations frequently disagree with each other about what is or is not true despite that. That's the entire point of competition and why competitive economies work better than centrally planned economies: often it's just not clear what is or isn't true, and "trueness" may well be different depending on who is asking, so different firms just have to duke it out in the market. Sometimes an agreement emerges and competitors start copying the leader, sometimes it never does.
Facebook has a disastrously collapsing system here because they are not only trying to decide what's true in the narrow space of social network design, but trying to decide what's true for any possible statement. This is as nonsensical as GOSPLAN was; it can never work. Heck they aren't even a respected authority on the question of what's true in social networking anymore, that's why they had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. Their competitors beat them. To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale.
>trying to decide what's true for any possible statement
Any possible statement that happens on their platform, yes. That's generally how it works when you have a company and I don't see how Facebook is doing anything out of the ordinary here -- any company can fire employees/customers for lying. If they know there are lies being posted on their site, it's perfectly reasonable to delete them. In fact I wish they would take more effort to delete more lies and falsehoods, the website is unusable when everybody is caught up in discussing a lie and doesn't want to hear the truth.
>To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale.
I really can't agree. In general, we know what's true for politics: it's what the elections and the courts decide, at least in the US anyway. By design those are the authoritative sources. There is no authoritative source for science but with that you can verify the accuracy of any statement by testing it yourself and reproducing (or not reproducing) the results, that's the whole point. I don't see why it would be arrogant of a company to do this, as it's what a company is supposed to be doing in order for the system to work.
Best to apply any moderation as minimally as possible. Tag posts which cause arguments as "controversial" and leave it at that.
That's just silly. Some facts are incontrovertible. Do you really think there's any room for disagreement that the earth is round, or that water freezes at 0 degrees C?
> One man's racism is another man's plain speaking.
There's no room in this world for racism, and you shouldn't be trying to defend it here - or anywhere.
>Gmail spam filtering [...] works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics
>an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left
This is more of what I meant: I find these arguments to be unconvincing, if you're going to make these claims convincingly then you need to show proof of this. Remember we're talking about two billion users here. Your post does not read like an actual attempt to solve the problem but instead an attempt to attack "activists on the left" and "the NYT set" which I don't even know who you're talking about or what that's supposed to mean in this context, I would advise against making these type of statements. It would be more convincing to mention a specific person or persons, what their claims are, and what you disagree with and why.
>Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments".
This is false, there's no personal attack, I'm saying your comments are unrelated to the argument and are not convincing to me. If you're confused about this, a personal attack would be something along the lines of "X person is a bad person because they follow Y political persuasion" which your comments could be construed as doing about Facebook's employees. So please make sure not to do that. This is again why I highly suggest against making this a political argument, usually it results in someone getting defensive, when there's no reason to do that.
If you want me to put this more frankly: I don't care about your politics or facebook's politics, that's not an interesting subject to me. It's nothing personal against you or facebook. Just talk about the problem please, otherwise I don't want to continue this discussion.
>A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents.
This also seems not really related to the argument. Sure it affects politicians but as has been established, that's a side effect of the way the system has been designed. I don't think it makes a difference whether the side effect was intentional or not.
To flesh this out, look at the examples in the article where moderation decisions split or were reversed - that's the problem XCheck is designed to solve. Most are about politics:
- Saying "white paint colors are the worst" was classed as racism. Trying to define and then scrub all racist speech from the world is a left wing policy.
- A journalist who (we are told) was criticizing Osama bin Laden was classed automatically as supporting him, and then human moderators agreed. Scrubbing this sort of thing is (in the USA) historically either a right wing or bipartisan consensus. We don't know why the moderators agreed because the comments themselves are not presented to us. This was later overridden by higher ups at Facebook.
- Split decisions over Trump's post saying "when the looting starts the shooting starts" that got escalated to Zuckerberg himself.
- "The program included most government officials but didn't include all public candidates for office".
etc. If you try to ignore politics, the entire debate becomes meaningless, because indeed, you would not even perceive any problem with unequal enforcement in the first place.
This again would be a side effect. Obviously it's not irrelevant but I have seen no reason to prioritize that over anything else.
>because the concerns are fundamentally political to their core
If by political you mean "needs to be solved with politics" then I can't necessarily agree, this is also a technical problem. To put it another way, it wouldn't just magically get fixed if you elect some new congresspeople or replace Zuckerburg, the new people still have to take additional technical steps to fix the problem. If the solution already exists and is being ignored then I would agree, but I have seen no solution offered in this thread. Instead of trying to present the solution, which I have asked you to do repeatedly, it seems you're still trying to make this a political argument, which I wish you wouldn't do. I don't know how many times I need to say that it's not convincing to me to come at it from that angle. I'm sorry if that seems rude but it's the truth of the matter. If your end goal is to campaign for me to vote for somebody, please stop, I'm not interested to hear it (again nothing personal).
On the rest of your comment: I honestly have no idea what your examples are supposed to mean, why you are making these assumptions or why the political motives or policies of some other parties matters. There will always be some users that take issue with any kind of filtering and it makes no sense to me to prioritize ones who happen to have adopted something as a political position at some arbitrary point in the past. If your issue is "unequal enforcement" then can you please elaborate on how a different kind of filtering would help with any of these examples? Why would a different system result in not needing to step in and reverse controversial decisions? I asked for proof of this a few posts ago and you didn't give any.