Facebook to target harmful coordination by real accounts
reuters.com
reuters.com
The FBI is not going to intervene in Facebook brigading.
The ONLY time a tech company works with police is when they are obligated to, by law. It's actually quite a shame, I think it's actively harming our society. Laws without enforcement are worthless.
Analysis: Engaged, active users. Encourage them to engage more!
For example what you are saying could be said by Cassie at Crowdsurf against the #FreeBritney crowd. But given that she's helping the public image of an unconstitutional and abusive conservatorship means that I don't WANT FB to do what she wants.
However it could also be said by someone representing the latest person who has been canceled for failing to be sufficiently politically correct. And in that case I'd be sympathetic.
Person A tackles person B to the ground and holds them there against their will. Is that morally acceptable? There's no way to tell.
If A is B's estranged ex-husband and is upset that she hasn't returned his calls, most people would say it's unacceptable behavior. If A is a bystander to a knife attack by B on London bridge, most people would (and did) say that it is justified.
When we make out laws they should be impartial and not put the thumb on the scale when writing them.
We don’t say, it’s illegal to commit theft, well, unless you’re the government or the judge, then it’s okay because we know you must have good intentions.
It shouldn’t be like: oh it was Joe the grocer, yeah he’s okay, let ‘im go. Vs, oh it was Ernie the latrine digger, he always makes my skin crawl; throw the book at him!
Even if both antivaxxers and doctors have opinions on if people should get vaccinated it would be insane to treat them equally.
That’s not her job. She’s not there to suss out truth or even narrative. We’re all there for community chit chat.
The WHO and the CDC have changed their minds over and over. Yeah, I get it -things change. Exactly, what's true today may not be true tomorrow and that is the point. People should be able to have a discussion.
The problem with third parties passing judgement is that they often lack full context.
Any system is going to be imperfect. The question is, is it better than things currently are?
I fully agree with you that when judging a specific occurrence, the context is really important. Judging completely without context, on the other hand, is good way to know whether the action is something morally acceptable.
In this case, the 'goodness' of the action clearly depends on whether you like the target. So I'd argue that this really is not a good thing in general. It's slightly worse if it hits the 'good guys' and slightly better if it hits the 'bad guys', but it's not good either way.
Imo if Facebook wants to be less toxic (no pun intended?) they would want to quell these as well. As long as we are algorithmically deciding what gets views id prefer the bias skew positive and not negative no matter how justified.
Most people would agree Nazis are bad (except for the Nazis themselves), then you have anti-vax. In my opinion bad but clearly not an opinion shared by a large group of people.
We'll live in a world where free speech is controlled by tech corps. Which is all well and dandy when their views align with yours but horrific when they don't. The other option would be to not have anyone policing speach which has shown to be problematic as well.
The legal system needs to step up and own online speach monitoring and removals
(I'm guessing you're US-based.) So instead of many poor systems trying to do better, we'll end up with one uniform system working poorly, that just became a nuclear-hot political target implicating the 1st Amendment.
The only arguably positive thing that does is relieve pressure on the platforms, while not allowing any behavioral diversity and making any future moderation adjustments a massive culture-war fight.
I just don't understand why anyone thinks judges should be adjudicating trust and safety issues, why they think that will lead to better outcomes, or why forcing private actors to carry speech they won't want to (which seems to be the goal of such proposals) is in any way proper.
Not to mention the staffing issues you're going to have, running all these disputes through the courts...
We already have this in the US though. Existing precedent is perfectly clear about what is and isn't permitted speech under the law.
But a significant subset of the population isn't happy with the status quo. Hence tech companies censoring things, cancel culture, etc, etc.
Or you think no monitoring is the best scenario, even with evidence of how speach has been weaponized on social media to push for conflict.
Actually, I disagree with the bit where I said there's no good solution. Curtailing free speech is never a good solution as far as I'm concerned. Freedom includes the ability to choose to behave poorly. This is a fundamental consequence of having a free society.
This doesn’t cast a value judgement on whether any of this is good or bad, just that you’ll never get an objective measure of the situation based on just what the person you are replying to have us.
Also I think it can be argued that democracy and mob mentality are pretty damn related :)
This is implied in the fact that no details were given, so I just find it incredibly strange that anyone would consider it an "astute comment". I suppose you must be referencing others in the thread who think they (or Facebook) can simply request a few details and efficiently judge correctly right or wrong.
I understand that a lot of people will see comments and posts from people they don't like, some of those comments might be mean, rude, etc. But that's the cost of becoming public person - in the old days public persons were actors, politicians, etc. Today anyone can become one.
And I don't buy the "noble" aim of the platforms to fight "misinformation", "hate speech", "conspiracy theories". There are so many examples of misinformation from "trusted" resources (e.g. covid vaccine efficacy [1], [2], Saddam Hussein nuclear weapon and so on) and so many conspiracy theories turned out to be true (starting from Watergate, through Iran-Contras to Snowden revelations) that as a society we would be much better without preventive censorship.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4826 [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/recs/grade/covid-19-pfizer...
Above official "trusted" resources claimed 95% efficacy while in practice it turned out to be much lower [3], obviously because of "new variants", as if it was a big surprise that corona viruses are mutating (common knowledge from 1960-ties) and covid-19 is just one of them, so claim that vaccine will end covid-19 infections was very far fetched, delicately speaking (not using hate words like "lies" or "cheap PR to sell more vaccines").
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...
As for "hate speech" no one is forced to post/comment on Twitter or FB and meeting people who are not nice is just a part of life. Kids at school has to tolerate colleagues (and teachers) they don't like and nobody cares, first caveman also liked less or more other cave inhabitants and had to live with that.
Can’t say more, because it’s a guess based on posts and job requirements.
So front/standard moderation is outsourced and more advanced threat detection is looking at large coordinated networks.
It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs.
I’ll also admit, that as poor security through obscurity is, it’s a useful speed bump here.
It’s kinda odd to contemplate how this space will evolve.
I mean... do _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this sort of thing that would survive being published for the world to see?
I don't mean to offend you or anything, I just want to point out that the second you go public with your rules about how these things are detected, the people you are targeting will adjust their behavior to evade them.
I think that the secrecy is unfortunately a hard requirement until perhaps we could all coordinate into a global "behavioral score" system. And to be honest, that sort of shit is terrifying, so we should probably never do it.
Settings > Timeline
X chronological
X only what your friends shareHeck - the original fake news phenomenon was Macedonians (?) making websites that looked like news sites to earn click through money.
People could just do that - “spam from the poisoned well”
However, I will make the case that something of this magnitude should be available to the public.
I would try to come up with a rule-based system that actually detects the bad behavior they don't want to have. Of course, people are then free to circumvent that system by not behaving badly.
I’ve read papers which specifically highlighted this lacuna.
Well that's just TERRIFYING. My account can get flagged... Not because of what I say, but because of who I know?
Talk about a way to unperson someone. Make it so that even associating with them causes the social graph to collapse.
For example, if there is a group where each member connects to most other members and nazism is the common denominator, then it is identified az a nazi group. If you connect to a large part of the group, then you are a potential nazi. If you know someone in that group and most of your other contacts are unrelated, you are probably not a nazi.
It is not that someone is marked as a supernazi and turns everyone he touches into a nazi.
> If you connect to a large part of the group, then you are a potential nazi.
IOW
> > My account can get flagged... Not because of what I say, but because of who I know?
Don't worry, when the US implements a social credit system it will be better than China's because it will be piecemeal and run by unelected tech companies instead of the government!
This is not unreasonable. I don't think for a second it's just organic trolling that's causing them problems. They have taken money from literal nation-states attempting to wage war by informational means and crush their enemies. Genocides in small countries doesn't begin to sum up the real threat profile here. Facebook could bear responsibility for actively aiding efforts to plunge the globe into hot war, if their paying customers got ambitious and foolish enough.
Small wonder they're trying to get things under control, but under control THEIR way. If they don't mitigate, they're liable to end up in the Hague.
The same way it did on reddit: sock puppets and chat servers outside reddit where the people radicalize themselves further.
The cherry on that shit cake was when /r/againsthatesubs started posting child porn to try and get subs they don't like banned.
Social media is a cancer that's growing on society. We need to go back to smaller online presences instead of a "global village" as it were. Too many things to worry about in the world, and too many companies want to sell you fear with advertising.
On Facebook, people who are rude & impolite are rewarded with more engagement. Real consequences are very rare.
It's a real problem.
I feel like this is a big part of why Discord has gotten hugely popular. Communities are isolated and only semi-publicly accessible; most critically, they're not indexed by Google. On most servers, people are using aliases which are not (directly) linked to their real-life identities, but they're still people you get to know and befriend, unlike Reddit-likes where the people commenting are mostly interchangeable. These things make the internet feel a lot closer to how it was in the 90s and early 00s, where you could talk freely with your friends without worrying if someone with a grudge would take what you wrote and turn it into a mob-driven character assassination.
Kind of like transparency reports with regard to data requests.
"Watchdogs say that this coordination between governments and online platforms lacks transparency and operates through an alternative enforcement mechanism that denies due process of law. In the vast majority of cases, the Cyber Unit doesn’t file a court order based on Israeli criminal law and go through the traditional legal process to take down online posts. Instead, the Unit makes appeals to the platform’s content moderation policies and community standards. The enforcement of these policies though can be selective, devoid of different cultural contexts, and flexible to the interests of the powerful."
https://prospect.org/world/how-secretive-cyber-unit-censors-...
Why do we afford Facebook the right to decide for us at all?
I want to go back before you can’t tell the difference between the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese.
And you highlight it; China has found a way to lean on the country in a million different ways.
The threat of what that would do to the global economy should help them get the protection they need.
Also, the 2016 election broke big tech a little, but covid turned big tech into China, at least when it comes to that issue. It's as if anti-covid lockdown activism was the west's June 6th tinnamen square remembrance movement. It also broke google in much the same way. I have to use Yandex or at least duckduckgo when searching for information about any controversial topic now. To even hear what the anti-lockdown crowd has to say I have to go to obscure telegram channels.
Facebook isn't the worst offender even. I recently tried to have a political discussion on nextdoor and me and a couple of other people just gave up because all our comments kept getting deleted. This is what I call "The lost doggy and kitty internet".
On "The lost doggy and kitty Internet" only the most light topics can be discussed. Only yoga classes and lost kitty notices are allowed. On the lost doggy and kitty internet there is a polite dinner party taking place, with a slaughterbot drone hovering overhead, buzzing around between partygoers listening everywhere intently for wrong think with a hair trigger fire button ready to go if any section of the crowd starts hurting people's brains...
I know "deplatforming" seems like a good idea, and is effective in the short term, it just strikes me as ultimately the wrong level at which to attack anti-social behaviour on "social networks".
I believe that experiment has already been run.
They are simply running into externalities, that's all.
I don't know if that group used any particularly bad tactics, but on the surface that statement sounds like squashing free speech. IDK about germany, but I'm sure FB will do that in the US too. All because "it's our private platform and we are not the government so no first amendment here".
Like what the eff. People can’t even freely mention an anecdote anymore if it is contrary to the set narrative?
What the eff happened to us in the last two years?
It’s frankly, disgusting and very concerning.
Nothing is stopping Nikki from hosting her own website.
Yes, but then, why should there be laws that shield these services from any legal responsibility as to what their users post? The government shouldn't need to protect these businesses either and let them off the hook because of the scale of the moderation. it goes both ways. Private companies can accept whatever they want, the government doesn't have to protect them either, they are a private company after all. They should bear all the risk.
That doesn't mean I'm necessarily in favor of preventing these companies from moderating things. It just concerns me to see such obvious aspects disregarded.
But… it should concern people the concerted effort to censor anything including the truth if it doesn’t fit a particular narrative.
What is Twitter decided hey, they wanna be on the side of the police and now anyone reporting anything that goes against the police narrative gets banned, true or made up. Does that sound okay?
It’s effed up of people think that that’s okay because they are a private company and it’s their platform…
Did you notice that you shortened it from "Minaj claimed a friend of a cousin..." to "Minaj claimed a friend...?" Hey, you're human too just like all of us. We suck at passing along rumors.
It’s no different from the banning of the Wuhan lab escape theory that was banned because… I dunno some republican happened to like it? Meanwhile lots of virologists believed it should at least be investigated. But no, originally only racists could consider it as a possibility.
No, Twitter can eff off.
Nikki Minaj didn't tweet about a "bad reaction" but a completely fabricated third or fourth hand story about someone's balls swelling up.
She was also not banned. Twitter literally said they were taking no action against her.
Nikki then tried to rile up her fans by crying "I'm getting cancelled" despite the fact that she was clearly not.
That said, apparently swollen testes are reported in the VAERS as a reaction to the vaccine. Not a great amount but also non-zero.
The third pedophiles.
The fourth BLM, or some type of socialist.
At that point you've built up enough bipartisan support to remove everyone from the platform who might possibly threaten ad revenue.
Unfortunately you've also made the platform so boring people will leave at the first chance.
For example, I reported a post today that was a blatant attempt to steal my log-in information. Facebook's response: "it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards."
This was for a post that was impersonating Facebook.
I've heard very similar stories from many other people.
Obviously, Facebook just can't handle even the most basic problems to do with moderation. There are so many problems on their platform that go beyond the most obvious attempts at fraud and scams. Yet, if they can't properly handle the most obvious scams, how can we trust them to properly moderate anything at all?
Facebook sent a notification later to them that the account was not impersonating anyone, no action would be taken, and there was no way to appeal.
Interestingly, messenger did splat a bunch of pretty good warnings on top of the DM they sent me: https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png
With an advertising model there are always going to be incentives to fake accounts, and disincentives to FB to close any account. The simple way to stop fake accounts would be to introduce even a small cost to have an account which would make faking accounts not cost effective. But that's not their model.
"Who govern the governors?"
But I am not surprised to see another Facebook censorship op.
Or that masks are a good idea.
Dissent from the popular opinion is good and healthy, going both ways.
A few examples. There is a reasonable possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Vaccine passports for COVID-19 are likely to become a thing. The conservatorship of Britney Spears is unconstitutional, and has been a vehicle for grand larceny.
So how do we suppress harmful misinformation, such as that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud. And not provide tools that can be misappropriated against truths which are inconvenient to people with money and influence?
Hell, even in the run-up to the 2020 elections the press were pushing the narrative that it'd be impossible to know the results weren't hacked and the election was valid - right up until it became clear Trump had lost, at which point it became absolutely certain they were valid and the audit chains and processes so robust only a conspiracy nut would question them. The same kinda happened in reverse in 2016.
However the big difference between partisan beliefs about the two elections is this. After 2016, Democrats mostly believed that they lost at the polls due to an effective disinformation campaign run by the Russians. After 2020, Russians believed that they lost due to widespread vote counting fraud. As https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/24/partisan-voters-claim-we... says, Democrats and Republicans believe this by almost exactly the same margins.
But what is believed matters. Democrats may have been furious, but they believed in rule of law. Radical Republicans, by contrast, attempted to overturn the election via an insurrection.
We shouldn’t expect that not “suppressing information” is ever in their best interest. Or that it would be something new for them. It seems like fantasy to think in those terms.
We recognize that the "we" you're referring to are the "people with money and influence." "Harmful misinformation" from their perspective is information that they dispute either factually or through implication or perspective that could harm them, the people with money and influence.
> So how do we suppress harmful misinformation, such as that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud.
With clear and extensive explanations and transparency. The people who insisted loudly that there was no widespread fraud the moment the election ended in their favor were operating with as little factual, auditable information as the people who were insisting that there was. The people who were insisting on a fraud narrative were of course consuming a lot more misinformation, but both sides were pretending that they were knowledgeable about something they weren't, at all.
Also to your specific example of the election, a lot of people who spoke out fairly quickly against the fraud information were operating on the factual, auditable information that both sides were presenting their data to judges of various persuasions around the country, and the judges were virtually unanimously concluding that there was no case. And then various recounts began coming back, likewise concluding that there was no fraud.
I don't know what standard of evidence you think people should have spoken out at. But that seemed at the time to be a reasonable level of evidence. And it still does. The judges in this case were literally a collection of people chosen to be trustworthy, with varying political alignments, who were making informed decisions on the basis of more data than I have, and consistently came to the same conclusion.
A similar kind of thing for fact checks would be a standard that I could be comfortable with. But it has to be similar. A collection of independent people. Chosen on the basis of methodology. With different political alignments. And it is only when they broadly agree that we are willing to impose rules.
The Twitter problem will only be solved with violence.
The Google problem will only be solved with violence.
Basically, entering the witness protection program and selling out those they've worked for in the past. Getting a huge cash-out, reputation laundering, and going away to preside over a dwindling number of hapless and heavily surveilled 'users', reporting on their doings to the authorities.
That is very much the winning endgame for Facebook. They turned out not to be bigger than governments.
I recognize that I am extrapolating real group behavior to real individual behavior, but I think that extrapolation is warranted given that we've just made the jump from group bot behaviour to group people behavior.
I don't want government to force businesses to allow speech, but we need to actively oppose private enterprises when they limit speech, and support alternatives that embrace freedom.