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Comment by cstoner | Hacker News Reader

> It’s a huge pity that the state of the art in modern troll combat is behind NDAs.

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.

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> do _you_ have any ideas about how to fix this sort of thing that would survive being published for the world to see?

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.

This is pretty much the equivalent of “I would try to make a rocket that just lands on Mars instead of crashing”. All I gotta do is make it take off instead of not taking off.

how to draw an owl: 1. draw some circles 2. draw the rest of the fucking owl

Indeed, if somebody wants to build a rocket that flies to Mars, then it should better not crash, and the equivalent to not crashing is an algorithm that actually detects the bad behavior. Kind of strange that you're making fun of that very basic requirement. The problem really is that Facebook's algorithms are like rockets that crash too often (~generate too many false positives) and their "solution" is to ignore the crash death toll for maximum cost cutting (~minimize human intervention).

Sure:

Settings > Timeline

  X chronological
  X only what your friends share

I'm curious how things look for people who are only friends with people of their extreme political persuasion and only likes/follows similarly extreme pages? Does giving some variety of relatively less extreme viewpoints cause a reduction extreme viewpoints?

Perhaps it isn't the purview of an infrastructure company (Facebook in this case) to attempt to manipulate society?

How do I keep my friends from sharing means. There are a lot of them.

unfriend them

That loses the good of being their friend with the bad. On facebook I only have people I know personally, and so I want to see their family pictures.

This is certainly a desirable change from a user perspective. However, the issue under discussion is coordinated abuse by a group against some entity. I don't see how this addresses that.

only what your friends share in chronological order => bad actors can't influence what gets shown first and if a friend shares disagreeable coordinated materials unfriend

You just need to spam people then.

Heck - 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”

If someone shares SPAM you will see it once and then it will be below what you check the next time. You can unfriend someone that shares too much SPAM. You can report it too. There's no good way for an adversary to game an aglo that decides what to put on your timeline more often when the algo is most recent first.

No I fully agree, which is why I made a mention of security through obscurity.

However, I will make the case that something of this magnitude should be available to the public.

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