Facebook's Response to Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers Is Weak | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Response to Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers Is Weak

wsj.com

29 pointsdwynings9 comments

"In 2020, Facebook employees and contractors spent more than 3.2 million hours searching out and labeling or, in some cases, taking down information the company concluded was false or misleading, the documents show. Only 13% of those hours were spent working on content from outside the U.S."

Our goal is to connect the whole world, and we sure as hell love their MAU and engagement, but we won't bother to try and keep cartels from posting their executions on our site, because ...

Resources are allocated based on expected value. US users are more valuable to advertisers, so naturally they get more attention.

I actually think the quote exonerates facebook. 3 million hours per year is a lot.

There's always going to be something objectionable, even if we could agree on what constitutes objectionable. Facebook is getting pulled in different directions by pearl clutchers, governments, and libertarians.

It's one of those issues that's easy to throw stones at but the problem space is too large and fraught with conflicting interests.

Facebook could stop trying to grow as quickly as possible. They are clearly trying, and they are clearly failing. That doesn't exonerate them, it highlights a problem that must be solved for global safety.

> Company researchers in 2019 set up a test account as a female Indian user and said they encountered a “nightmare” by merely following pages and groups recommended by Facebook’s algorithms.

> “The test user’s News Feed has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore,” they wrote. The video service Facebook Watch “seems to recommend a bunch of softcore porn.”

> After a suicide bombing killed dozens of Indian paramilitary officers, which India blamed on rival Pakistan, the account displayed drawings depicting beheadings and photos purporting to show a Muslim man’s severed torso. “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past 3 weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” one researcher wrote."

Facebook's default content consumption mode is to create a nightmarish experience. FB doesn't care as long as those ad clicks are working ok.

It's an interesting experiment, but is that realistic? It sounds like the test account just followed the first n things recommended, then the next n, then the next. Sort of like the game where one clicks the first link in the wikipedia article and ends up at philosophy.

Any real user doesnt follow random links, but ones he/she is interested in.

Its not like facebook has a monopoly--users would leave if they were genuinely dissatisfied.

"On Jan. 13, nine days after the report was circulated internally, the first post appeared on a new CJNG Instagram account: A video of a person with a gold pistol shooting a young man in the head while blood spurts from his neck. The next post is a photo of a beaten man tied to a chair; the one after that is a trash bag full of severed hands."

OMG!

The more important part of the title is "The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show."

How did this article just get 26 upvotes? It's so disgusting and disturbing to read.

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