Apple threatened Facebook ban over slavery posts on Instagram
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
There are some NGOs like IJM who have teams of analysts that scout for trafficking victims on Facebook all day. It's largely a manual process that requires infiltrating public groups and connecting with suspicious profiles. Oftentimes, it's just strange dogwhistles to look out for like profiles of young women that say "Frycook at the Krusty Krab."
I helped build an app for an anti-human trafficking hackathon (we dubbed it "The Creeper Crawler") that scraped abusive profiles. I think ML could be a powerful tool for flagging these profiles, but this is a larger moderation problem I see no easy solution to.
Even looking at HN’s reaction, which has a strong component rationalising for Facebook, it’s unsurprising that Facebook is itself divided on its responsibility to moderate. Even when we get to literal slavery.
A risk from this is contagion. The fish rots from the head down. But it’s been rotting for some time. Those people will, after Facebook, move on to other roles of influence.
How can someone work for a company that has such a history of doing or allowing dirty deeds, often suppressing the evidence.
Starting from the very top of Facebook, it is a completely amoral company.
Google, on the other hand, is just moreso just naive and seems to believe it can solve problems with AI, without human judgment or oversight.
No, you couldn’t, because while those things aren’t great, they aren’t literal slavery being advertised while the person they’re paying the ad money to looks the other way.
Most of the facebook customers are small business, that benefit enormously from access to facebook, especially in the third world. They now have access to much larger pool of users. This drives economic growth and gradually brings prosperity to undeveloped countries, or disadvantaged small businesses. For example facebook has facebook light app, which is a lightweight app targeted for older phones.
The way ads work on fb is very simple you sign up for fb account and then basically, can post your ad. There are million of ads in hundreds of languages, although facebook works day and night to remove violating content. I'm sure facebook fight with abusers never ends. If you do not understand how hard this problem is, you're probably, have never been exposed to fb scale before.
Some companies, however, it seems, have given up on fighting the abuse altogether. For example, telegram has groups openly selling revenge porn, illegal heavy drugs, prostitution etc...
Other companies bypass third world countries and disadvantageous population altogether, like apple whose premium priced product are out of reach for these people in need.
If drugs, sex work and slavery are the same to you, and others sort of doing it makes selling ads for it okay, Facebook might be a good fit.
The examples, is just what you are *Bombarded* with on telegram if you vanture a bit away from corporate channels and happen to know other languages than English.
I personally haven't seen any charitable or notable contributions by Facebook, Google in those spaces (i.e. slavery, human trafficking or child exploitation) - admitedly, I could have missed news on their efforts.
Well... you [FB employees] kind of are.
What have you done to stop facebook?
Meanwhile, we can make it less easy for them to do it by eliminating as many of the tools they use as possible.
As for stopping Facebook, I don't know if anyone can. The most we can do is stop using it. Like some people, I maintain an account out of necessity for the unfortunate times that the only way I can find or communicate with a business or person is on that platform. But my account can go months without me logging in.
If I were 20 years younger, I would be working on one of the open source community platforms or communication platforms in the hope of someday providing a an easy to use and ubiquitous product that would give normal people an alternative to FB. Maybe I still will now that I have quit my job.
Say they resign... then FB just gets someone else to do their job.
Nothing and no one is pure evil or pure good. Everything is complex. You may call some Facebook actions evil, but that does not mean there is also good in Facebook. For example, plenty of people meet their significant others on Facebook or reconnect with estranged family and friends.
I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image, but if they wanted to pay me lots of money to work on some open source project that was important to me, I'm not sure I would say no.
It's not so much that they are evil, it is that FB is optimising for FB's profits, which may conflict with other things that other people value,
> I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image
Uber is close, if not exceeding FB.
I also get the impression that people are a good deal more cynical and hostile towards Google and Apple now than they were 10 years ago (I know I am).
Uber took advantage of drivers, misleading them about income and viability of making a good living. They also aggressively ignored local regulations to be able to unfairly compete with local services. As bad as that is, it's still many steps above knowingly facilitating human trafficing.
Apple, for its many flaws, seems only to be semi-evil by probably knowingly allowing really bad labor practices at its Chinese factories. They either were knowingly failing to properly oversee, or they were intentionally ignoring. But it seems they have made an effort to improve in this regard.
Indeed. I would be very curious how many of the righteous in this thread are busy removing React from their web applications? Relay from their GraphQL API's? PyTorch from their data science projects? RocksDB from the endless number of infrastructure products that incorporate it?
How do you hold that developer responsible for human slavery due to his or her work, while you and your shop continue happily exploiting that work yourselves?
(Even if Facebook is more responsible than those parties, I think it's easy to understand how the median Facebook employee wouldn't see it that way, especially if their day-to-day job is something not directly having to do with communities/the newsfeed.)
There are no hard rules, just values and precedents. If I were to summarize the precedent, it would be a three-prong test: Do you know about the behavior? Do you contribute to it? Do you have the power to stop it?
If (1) and (2), we're at the Nuremberg threshold. That is, if the crime at hand rises to that of crimes against humanity, (1) and (2) alone should be enough. If it doesn't rise to that level, test (3) comes into question. "Stop" is an ambiguous term, as is "crimes against humanity," so there is a lot of subjectivity here.
But to take your analogy, no, a San Francisco warehouse worker at Cisco wouldn't be culpable for e.g. their CFO bribing a foreign official. A content buyer at Instagram isn't responsible for the slave ads. But engineers deploying the ad systems, incentivized by ad metrics? Business development? Any executive at Facebook? Somewhat to totally culpable.
Have you ever voted for any US representative or senator that got elected and wasn't Barbara Lee? Congratulations, your tests (1) and (2) say you're a war criminal.
Now, if Cisco were negotiating preferential deals with oppressive regimes or companies that were well known for committing what most would consider to be crimes against humanity, then Cisco should choose not to sell to those groups. This is exactly what I'm suggesting FB do.
We are just beginning to understand the ill effects of social media, and these companies themselves acknowledge it. Plenty of people at these companies are working to solve these problems.
What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email), which many times lead them to take decisions that are not at the best interest of consumer. I guess all ad supported VC businesses are bound to have this fate, though.
What would you call Apple pointing it out and Facebook continuing to monetize until Apple threatened to ban them from he App Store?
> What is indeed a wrongdoing of last decade of companies is the growth at all costs mindset which leads to weird engagement hacks (like LinkedIn sending you an email notification for a message but now showing the message content in email)
Are we really comparing the selling of ads for slavery with LinkedIn requiring clickthrough for their messages?
Its reminiscent of people who believe the US is fundamentally evil and the people who live in and vote in the country are complicit. The atrocities of the US far outweigh those that FB has done. If these people are OK being US citizens, being employees of FB seems like nothing.
And you extend this to being members of the military, the police, etc...
But one who chooses to work at Facebook (and reads HN) must know what goes on there; and they could choose a different, more ethical company.
The police provide necessary services. Facebook does not provide a necessary service. Some would argue that they prevent other, better services from existing because of their critical mass and financial means. So while plenty of bad things are done by some police, the service has value. Ethics aside, the value of Facebook is very marginal based on many studies.
Arguing against the value of FB is tough, given how much money it makes. In some sense, our society has determined that the BEST way to measure value is by how much money can it generate. By this measure FB has a lot of value.
You personally may not like FB. But my point is that there are a probably a lot of things that you hold dear (or at least don't find overly offensive) that others consider to do FAR more harm than FB ever has.
> It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there.
With a US passport, you can go many places and stay for a short time. You cannot, however, stay indefinitely. If you try, you will face many obstacles and quite possibly fail and be ejected.
Also, renouncing US citizenship is not like sending a letter or walking into an embassy and handing your passport back. There's an interview process and some financial preparation required.
Lastly, even if you did renounce, and you're somehow allowed to live in another country while you go through the (lengthy) process to get a new passport, you are now stuck in that one place. You cannot go anywhere. This is certainly not something you would do unless you were really desperate.
> It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there.
I was speaking of value to humanity, not value to FB execs and investors. This is not a money matter.
Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing. By this logic, you could excuse anything because you could always point to something worse.
This is aligned with your position on value to humanity. If you believe that the US is the greatest force against humanity in the modern world (which a lot of people do believe) then not being a part of it is extremely prudent. That inconvenience associated with not being able to visit other countries pales in comparison to being part of the evil which is the US (if this is what you believe).
> Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing.
It's all relative. If on the list of bad things in the world, I have FB below about 20 other things I have yet to act on -- and FB is paying the rent and my kids college then why should I act on that (as you point out with the police, there is some value to their service -- if I were employed by FB, they also provide value directly to me)?
Others may have a list of things that rate worse against humanity than FB (but we still "participate in them") such as the crimes committed by the US govt, abortions, police abuse, the prison industrial complex, my cheating best friend, regulatory capture in pharma, allowing animals to be imprisoned and killed for meat, our overreliance on plastics, etc... There's a lot of problems in the world that harm humanity. FB just simply isn't high on most people's list. I'm not saying it isn't high on yours. In which case, you definitely shouldn't work there or use it. I'm just trying to prepare you for the fact that most people, myself included, just don't rank this very highly. And I certainly don't hold it against people that work there -- except for maybe Mark himself.
This is true of the telephone. Of the newspaper. Of text messages. Of telegram services. Of video chat. Of magazines. Of public meeting areas like park benches.
Every single one of these platforms have been used for human trafficking and other illegal behavior. It's ubiquitous, always has been, and always will be because the communications on a system are reflective of the humans using them.
The subjective question is whether Facebook puts enough effort into policing their platforms, and it's the exact same question posed (for example) to a city regarding the policing of solicitation in public parks. There will always be people unhappy with the level of enforcement in a common platform. It's reasonable to ask for more enforcement, but I cannot see a compelling argument that Facebook's communications platform is somehow less ethical than any other.
It's one thing to say, "this is hard and we're not good at it yet". It's another to hide evidence and pretend to be doing a good job, especially when you're talking about human lives.
Also, most of these other companies exist because they provide a real, needed service to people. Facebook creates the need (artificial) for the services they provide.
I think you're confusing carte-blanche acceptance (which I haven't suggested) with considering the relative weight of your suggested ethical issue.
Have you called for people to quit working for ATT? For Google? Are there any telecom or software companies you don't think people should refuse to work for?
If you ever vote for a mainstream candidate, this line of argument falls flat. You are now participating in the process and actively supporting someone who is actually making the bad stuff happen.
It’s like calling for violence, there isn’t a question it has to be moderated.
The gray areas are non illegal things like hate speech.
Should #slavery be blocked? That hashtag probably also used for protesting and reasonable things. So you can’t just block all these terms - you should try to only block the ones abused.
Then, what about trickier terms? Once you block the words people start using code words instead. You need to constantly find these and remove them, and make sure you don’t block too many posts and people that didn’t deserve it.
Wait, does that actually mean something? I have seen it many times and assumed it was just an innocuous SpongeBob reference.
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/krusty-krab-facebook-emp...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3d45t9/commen...
That reddit thread explains it pretty well. Facebook will nag you unless you provide an answer. Many people avoid associating themselves with their employer publicly and pop-culture is the first thing to come to mind.
That's pretty much the opposite of "proactive".
The article seems to conflict itself on this subject.
And US companies should choose to not, and perhaps should be banned from, operating in countries where their services are used for human trafficing. FB and Google shareholders should demand this from their companies. Of course it will mean some reduced revenue, but I think most Americans regardless of political affiliation would agree that human trafficing is just unacceptable.
Additionally, Facebook and Google are very smart. They can connect dots (accounts). They know who is selling humans, and they could perma-ban these people. Essentially it should be possible to prevent these people from ever using any account on any of the major tech services.
It just seems like platform bans do very little other than move the activity into more shadowy places.
Normally I would agree about bans pushing the activity into shadowy places, but at least in this case it would probably limit the exposure to just the countries with the bad practices. Basically it would hopefully limit more international trade of people.
From the opposite perspective, since Facebook unfortunately seems to be a common place for businesses to promote themselves, cutting off a country (with clear explanation why) would perhaps make some of its businesses put pressure on the government to enact some changes. Basically it would limit economic activities, and most individuals/businesses/governments don't want that.
Now, there is some question about the value of cooperation with international authorities but that is undercut by the long history of not working with those organizations and concealing problems rather than reporting them. I'm not sure that can happen without something like a regulatory requirement with personal liability for senior management in the event of non-compliance — they need to fear this at least as much as, say, a financial firm fears lying to the SEC.
Now, reporting those people to the authorities for investigation might be ok, but that assumes the authorites object to the behaviors.
Let's Perma-ban as many people as possible so these sites look like a disney movie.
Let's perma-ban political figures I don't support.
Let's perma-ban all.. and move to free platforms.
Are you still using Apple after finding out about them scanning your local photos? I guess that wasn't particulary convincing?
That's an insane ask. You'd be pulling Apple out of markets they have no intention of leaving, and you'd be forcing the entirety of FAANG to double down on their domestic authority if they want to survive (see: collude harder with the NSA). I'm all for striking when the iron's hot, but it would be awfully easy to dent our nation while we're this malleable.
Yeah but you don't get credit in the media for working on the problem silently. You need to slam the banhammer so the censored speak out & everyone knows you're "doing the right thing".
/s
Um, I think this falls apart where human traffickers are supposed to speak out ...
Beyond that... human trafficking happens in USA. A lot around super bowl time.
In all seriousness I think Apple holding apps accountable for all content anyone on earth posts is just ludicrous.
This is completely reasonable.
It's absurd how some people dislike Apple so much they're willing to defend Facebook's right to provide human trafficking services.
For many of these people, Facebook == Internet.
This is not to discourage what you are saying, it’s just a note that what Safari shows is kind of arbitrary in the abstract.
Nobody here defends human trafficking. People defend freedom of speech and open computing.
But what does that have to do with Facebook? Facebook is not a free speech platform. They built and maintain their social network based on content moderation. Their social network, of course, is the reason anyone uses Facebook.
Anyway, Safari doesn't host and moderate the content of the internet, but Facebook certainly does host and moderate the content of Facebook. There's no real logical connection here.
If we want this content filtered out, what makes Facebook special in this chain such that it is their responsibility to perform the filtering? Why is Word not responsible for preventing the creation of the document in the first place? Why does the service provider not prevent the upload? Why does the printer not refuse to print the document? Or a screen blur the content?
I am not arguing that it is not the responsibility of Facebook, I just want to point out that - at least at first look - this seems to be pretty arbitrary pick. So what makes Facebook special? Is it just a matter of practicality because Facebook is the single point of failure in that chain that can not be bypassed?
[1] Let us ignore all the complications due to different jurisdictions.
Responsibility should be proportional to profit. I am not even sure Facebook is the most profitable link in this chain, but it probably is.
> Is it just a matter of practicality because Facebook is the single point of failure in that chain that can not be bypassed
And they have the best capability for that reason.
In your scenario they seem to be the place other people are "discovering" and downloading the PDF from. Perhaps gathering together to discuss whatever is in the PDF and reinforce each other's beliefs about the content. This could of course be done with a website/blog/forums but the reach of Facebook is of course immense, global and pervasive in pretty much every country. So Facebook is different because of its scale, network effect and ease of discoverability. The last issue with Facebook I would point out is that due to its corporate structure and size Facebook is only accountable to Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Zuckerberg is accountable to no one.
I think the real issue facing society is that Facebook will always err on the side of user engagement unless forced to behave otherwise. If Facebook was really just about "connecting people" which I take to be innocuous communication between users and sharing pictures of kids/pets/etc. then they would have to strip out the features that allow their worst communities to form and operate. But Facebook knows that crazy grandparents sharing conspiracy theories and racist drivel drives engagement and so that content largely remains. It's up to our societies to solve this problem, because history has shown that Facebook will only do the right thing when forced to.
Distribution. Each step until Facebook doesn't involve sharing with others, it's between you and a machine until that
So maybe you mean more like the discoverability for people is provided by Facebook. But would this then not also imply that search engines have to filter their search results? And in both cases I could argue that the service provider preventing the upload would also prevent discoverability on Facebook, and not only on Facebook but on the entire internet at once.
Facebook hosts the content and makes it available to the public. That is why they are special. None of the other steps do both
An advert for a slave isn't an issue if you write it, print it out and keep it in a draw. Likewise you can produce as much blasphemous, libellous, and obscene content as you like but if you don't share it with anyone, no one will care (unless you broke some law in creating it - stolen information, child pornography etc.)
Responsibility is the burden of those with the most means to enact change. There's no formal chain of logic for deciding where that burden lays. Your example presents every actor in the chain as equal options but depending on your political (philosophical) leaning you will want different actors to burden more or less of the responsibility. (control from the source or control from the event, or anywhere inbetween).
Word doesn't decided whether or not what you're typing should make it to the document based on how it impacts their revenue. Adobe doesn't render Mein Kampf instead of your doc based on revenue potential.
Facebook's business relies on moderating content to drive engagement to get ad/user-data money.
Not to mention, slavery is against Facebook's own TOS. So Facebook has taken up this responsibility themselves.
The ISPs are common carriers and do not get a say.
Facebook is not under the control of the user, and not a common carrier, so they should be held responsible, at least to some degree.
Ultimately, this is the textbook definition of virtue signalling. Apple was never going to ban Facebook; they just want to let people know they oppose slavery (their own factories excluded of course).
Apple doesn't make revenue based on some StumbleUpon-like Safari experience where they dictate the content in your Safari window.
Every tech platform is enabling illegal activities. Glorifying Apple and Google here is a mistake this article makes.
The biggest ally of slavery is of course an œconomic dependence thereupon. — The knight in the shining armor standing for the downtrodden remains awfully silent when he depends on said downtrodden for the polish to keep his armor so shiny.
Just because they follow the rules of another nation doesn't make them 'pro China'. Is Apple 'pro-US', 'pro-EU', 'pro-Saudi Arabia', etc? No, Apple is pro-business/pro-money. They are a company selling products and services around the world.
> People committing suicide after being forced to work endlessly.
Isn't that Foxconn, a Taiwanese company?
> Agreeing to the Great Firewall rules to continue doing business in China..
So you think facebook and apple should moderate content but China shouldn't moderate content?
> It is not just China, look at the Nabisco workers
A nice save.
> There is no reason extreme pressure couldn't start to force changes at these companies but mostly we are just glad it isn't us.
Change what? Rather than trying to change individual monopolistic companies, we should allow for more competition so that we can decide where to take our business. We have a problem of monopolies.
> Our whole society has lost all sense of empathy and it is sad.
Everyone has their own version of empathy. And everyone wants to enforce their version of empathy on everyone else. It's a problem humans and human societies have had forever.
It’s radical views like this which taint the technical community’s ability to project on policy. If your principles are so hardline that they’re on the side of ads for slavery, maybe double check your priors?
Outlawing encryption is a general and comprehensive prescription.
Apple telling Facebook to stop advertising slavery, Facebook doing nothing, and Apple coming back saying “for real, it’s slavery, if you don’t knock it off we’ll ban you from our App Store,” is specific and targeted. It’s also limited, in that Safari exists.
Facebook signed up for this scrutiny when they decided that not all posts were equal. If all posts had an equal chance (i.e., were exclusively sorted chronologically) then I think this would be a very different conversation. But that's just not as profitable so `viva la sedition!`
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
It was with a balled up fist, covered up in a velvet glove that I described the phenomenon as "forgotten"
because you're completely correct with this, IMO. It absolutely does get flatly ignored for convenient (but nonetheless ethically atrocious) politicization of criminality.
The actual text of 13A makes involuntary servitude and or slavery a specific statutory exemption to the abolition of slavery. How can one read it, then say it's "not the same thing"?
I wasn't aware that the merits and table stakes of this particular discussion was whether or not other countries permitted slavery, when several grandparent comments ago, it was established that the criticism was levied against the United States-in a discussion about actions taken by two corporations that exist in the United States?
Is the whataboutism regarding other countries and their statutory frameworks on slavery really relevant here?
>Is the whataboutism regarding other countries and their statutory frameworks on slavery really relevant here?
Yes, because the comment was directed specifically at the US with a sorry attempt at comparing it with fascist countries like China. allowing If we're going that route then there is nowhere slavery doesn't exist and the entire argument about avoiding slave countries is moot.
To answer your first question... absolutely NO, "slavery" of imprisoned people is not the same and I think you know that, otherwise you would not care if the 13th amendment existed at all. You're presenting a disingenuous argument with a semantic word game. Any sane person knows imprisonment "slavery" and slavery blacks endured isn't the same.
In contrast, many, if not all, European countries disallow forced work for prisoners. They may still offer jobs to prisoners, but the prisoners are not compelled to take them, do not suffer punishment if they don't.
I think you know that though.
As it is, using prison populations to provide lower-cost-than-otherwise-legal labor for private corporations creates a huge mountain of perverse incentives.
If you look specifically at people serving at least 1 year in a state prison (which is where most of the convicted prisoners are, as the link above shows), then it's a majority:
"However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that, as of the end of 2015, 54% of state prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year were serving time for a violent offense. 15 percent of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious infraction."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
The vast majority of prison labor is for the direct benefit of the states or the federal government, not private companies. Still a huge mountain of perverse incentives, though.
This is more or less a myth, depending on how you define "violent" and how you define "prison population." No matter how you define those terms, "a significant percentage of the prison population is there for a serious non-drug crime" should be uncontroversial.
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
Memes about mass incarceration have been almost too successful, so that people now have the wrong idea in the other direction. According to Wikipedia, "15 percent of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious infraction." That is enough of a scandal on its own terms, but people have sort of inflated the claims beyond what's really supported by the evidence. It's 15%, not "most" and not a majority, etc. In fact most prisoners are there for serious non-drug offenses.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Want to hire some slaves for call center work?
https://unicor.gov/ContactCenterVideo.aspx
They've also got slaves fighting fires in CA.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/califor...
Want some slave milk?
Side note, this article shows how easy and perversely widespread this barbarity is, however these women also endure physical beatings, emotional abuse and sexual exploitation (rape).
It's fair to say that their moderation sucks
Where people exist their problems follow them.
Arbitrary censorship, no recourse for errors, et c.
Now people want them to take over for police, too.
There is already an organization whose job it is to police illegal activity.
A lot of groups and pages (like newspapers) that have to "self-moderate" due to hate / propaganda spam posts and comments would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a quota in a Turk-like system for moderation.
Safer for the buyers and sellers I mean, not the slaves.
Too many scammers out there, advertising slaves - in this context, but really any market - but are in fact without said goods.
Can someone explain this to me? I ask this genuinely.
Facebook == bad/evil, so easy reaction.
Censorship == bad/evil, so easy reaction.
Fixing some of FB's bad requires censorship. uh-oh. This one might require some thought vs reaction.
Maybe we should all spend more time in the real world doing real things that make the world a better place so these evils happen less collectively. I’m going to do just that. I’ve just got a few more threads I need to comment on first…
People were just outraged at facebook last week for researching just that (how insta affects teens). I don't have much optimism in our ability to go beyond the surface.
Apple is saying Facebook you need to moderate your content.
Which the question becomes "Is Instagram more than a glorified web browser?"
---- The question is "when legally is apple responsible for UGC on instagram's servers?" That's the real question. Otherwise this would be moral grandstanding by Apple.
I'm pretty sure if anyone tried to sue Apple for "distributing objectionable content" they'd run to "we aren't responsible for what's on Instagram's servers." How responsible SHOULD Apple be for data hosted on instagram's servers?
Blocking slave adverts != Censorship
I have no problem with that.
Again, I don't think the nuance is subtle at all.
When someone is being truly genuine, I do not believe you will find that contradiction. It is possible that you may not have entirely understood what they have written, and looking for clarification may be worthwhile. Still, given the above, it is not likely worth your time. In places where there is incentive to be genuine, more exploration can be worth it.
That said, I try to suspend my disbelief regarding the impossibility of fighting the current and so try to be a good citizen in order to maintain a good city. I'm sure Plato or Kant or has written extensively about this, and dang seemed to approve when I discussed it with him in a separate venue.
So now that I've spent lots of years lurking, some more years posting and plenty of time screaming into the darkness elsewhere, I can feel satisfied if I post something that I know is interesting or helpful, even if I don't get any external feedback.
(I'm reminded of the whole descent-to-madness that certain areas have academia have undergone for the sake of bibliometrics. See e.g. Peter Higgs' comments: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... )
It's much more likely you're misunderstanding their position or missing some undisclosed nuance. Often I find this just comes down to most people lacking the vocabulary or ability to refine their positions consicely enough to form coherent and non contradictory positions.
If you take the time to work through their contrictory statements with them you'll likely find there was no contradiction in their mind, instead, there was just some nuance that got lost in translation.
There are a lot of stupid people in the world, but most of them are able to see reason if a) they're willing, and b) you're willing to help them get there.
The problem is that you're probably not going to get the answer you want so you have little incentive to put in the effort.
Extreme right wing outlets dominate Facebook interactions almost every day. How is it possible to have a victim complex about something so obviously not true?
WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-googl...
EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-shou...
Which is why some of the most extreme ones are booted off of platforms - because they consistently break the rules that every user agreed to follow.
"Conservative" isn't an accurate term for the American Right because in any other industrialized nation they would be considered an extremist party even by the conservatives. They are authoritarians doing their best to unravel democracy.
On the other side you've got a system where nothing can be censored, and while the lack of censorship of awful content is a drawback at least you have the advantage that nothing can be censored (even if it goes against corporate interests) to counter-balance it.
In short, one side only has drawbacks, while the other side at least brings some advantages to counter-balance those drawbacks.
You can still censor by lowering visibility (flooding it with opposing content for example).
"In theory" should be pretty obvious. "In practice" might require some explanation, because there seems to be a meme going around about trying to have another discussion with a person in a room where there are a bunch of people screaming at you to drown out your words. While that might be considered censorship in that exact scenario, that effect does not translate over into the internet - you simply block noisy sources on whatever platform you're on and keep reading the content that you're interested in. For instance, even though Matrix and Mastodon are federated, you can block users (and even entire servers) from either local visibility or even federation with your particular instance.
Similarly, nobody says that highly biased sites like the Verge, Vox, and the NYT are "censoring" opposing viewpoints because when you Google an issue all of the top results are from those sites with the same political bent - you can still craft Google queries that exclude those sites, one at a time.
I'm genuinely asking here, I think this is an interesting case and I'm not able to make my mind up.
Have actual humans pre-screen all ads before allowing them?
It is my opinion that the up side contribution to society from facebook outweighs the inevitable downsides.
However, in this case, sometimes it seems like Facebook wants to both be highly centralized and very powerful ("Just LOOK at how effective we are at convincing people to do things! Buy ads on Facebook!") and to also cede responsibility for some pretty abhorrent things that happen on its platform.
If you centralize, you own the platform - the good & the bad.
It feels unjust to reap massive profits and then hand-off all the social ills you cause.
I think this is more of a philosophic POV rather than a legally enforceable one (at least in the US today), but probably gets at some of the frustration people have with Facebook.
That is my take on AI/auto content moderation and the enforcement - they can't have it both ways; centralized platform, with no responsibilities.
So - hire people. Actual human beings - train them and hire large numbers from many demographic and geographic locations.
But - this would cut into profits.
Because the userbase is so ludicrously big "Massive" doesn't really convey the level of staffing in relative terms.
How many posts does the network have per moderator-workday?
What is the number for integrity, that you think would solve the problem and why? how so this compares to other companies and facebook. Luckily we have so many social networks we can do statistics?
And then, vefore you know this, and the problem at hand, maybe you should suspend your harsh judgment?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57088382
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...
>...15,000 people whom Facebook has said it has hired to inspect its posts.
How many similar contractors are there, say what about India?
Another thing, the moderation is a combination of ml technique and human, the next question is how much load ML takes a way from human operator. How efficient are their tools?
What is recall and precision of removing violent content?
How does this compare with other social networks?
How much moderation is done organically by users?
its about money, not the lack of ability.
I'm gonna assume the latter. And forget about 'massive', they clearly don't even want to hire enough to make it decently large.
Tech companies are fine hiring people when they can't just push the costs (social and monetary) onto others. But Facebook thinks it can - so it is.
Like you said, "If you centralize, you own the platform - the good & the bad." and I would extend that to "You can either choose moderation or waiving liability, but not both, because that's morally wrong (or, selfish/inconsistent/harmful/unfair)."
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
I didn't downvote GP - indeed, I can't, as it's a reply to my comment. My guess for why it was downvoted is because it's not directly connected to my point. I was trying to say "with great power comes great responsibility", but it's not clear that that principle is necessarily being violated with the examples given by GP.
To me, the position that a platform cannot morally moderate some content without incurring liability for all other content is rather extreme and the precepts are non-obvious. Presumably you mean moral liability rather than legal liability? Can you elaborate on the precepts here?
* what does moral liability mean? is the platform equally morally liable as the poster, or is the liability split between them? * where does this liability attach? how big do you have to be, or how much of a hand to you have to play in dissemination of content to incur moral liability? * and finally, why does choosing to moderate some content but not others change the moral calculus? This is totally non-obvious to me and TBH doesn't make a lot of sense.
The canonical examples of each are newspaper (publisher) vs newsstand (platform), but if I am running a newsstand and I choose not to carry the Times, that doesn't make me liable for the content of the Bugle.
That doesn't mean it's moral, I suppose, but it feels like an uphill battle to prove that it's not. What are the harms that derive from allowing platforms to moderate without assuming liability? What's the alternative? Either they lock down everything and have human moderators approve all speech submitted to the platform, which seems draconian and expensive, or they let everything through, which reduces the usefulness of the platform and forces them to host evil content or content that may cause more harm than good (e.g. medical disinformation). Either one seems worse than allowing moderation while waiving liability.
Further, this flies in the face of moral custom. Although there can be legal penalties under some scenarios, we generally don't find people very much at fault for illegal acts that take place in spaces they control unless they had knowledge of or participated in those acts. If my fiancee starts dealing drugs out of my house, and keeps it secret to me, I shouldn't be on the hook for that. And yet I can choose to "moderate" who does or does not live in my house.
What's different here? Facebook owns the space, would prefer not to serve hate speech, and 99.9% of its users would prefer not to be served hate speech. What's the harm? What moral principle should prevent them from doing so?
Finally, what about sub-platforms moderated by users? Can reddit morally allow subreddits to moderate? If they can't, so much the worse; but if they can how is that different in principle from reddit doing the moderating?
But yes. People who have the power to fix something unjust and don't are complicit in that thing.
If you got food that made you sick, do you blame the delivery service or the restaurant?
If the business is ads, data, and eyeballs, you should be responsible for what is on it.
Then why blame Facebook? Almost all the content on Facebook is user-generated. And don't think ISPs don't bank on getting you interact with content as though they're perfectly neutral platforms.
>If you got food that made you sick, do you blame the delivery service or the restaurant?
If it's a restaurant where the average joe can be a chef, then I blame particular person who cooked my meal. Not the restaurant (who only provided the facilities and menu) or the delivery service.
>If the business is ads, data, and eyeballs, you should be responsible for what is on it.
Only to the extent it's own ads are false. Beyond that, their is no duty for to police content in accordance with the desires of others. Information does not imply obligation.
>Can someone explain this to me?
I don't think there's any contradiction.
People on HN think slavery is bad because the enslaved person is forced to do work they don't want to; they don't have a Right To Walk Away[1] from their job. This means their pay and conditions are a lot worse than they would be if they could walk away form being enslaved.
And people on HN think Big Social Media is bad for roughly the same reason: in practical terms, there is no Right To Walk Away. Sure, you could build your own Facebook or Twitter (and many people on HN certainly have the skill to do so), but because of network effects it'll get nowhere. That's why decentralisation/interoperability with things like ActivityPub is attractive, and why it would be even better if the government mandated that all websites with user-generated content allowed such interoperability.
There's a very large streak of what I think of as hyperindividualism: I do what I want. It's not stated, but in practice it implies that any downstream negative consequences to others are negligible or even morally necessary. This predominates especially when the bulk of the audience sees themselves in the powerful person in the story.
There's also a strong streak of what I'd call compassionate individualism, where people identify with the less powerful person in the story. This can involve moral outrage on their behalf, and generally includes a more nuanced balancing of the individual rights of different people.
A good example is how HN talks about rising tech companies versus very dominant ones. On the way up, we tend to identify with the entrepreneur-CEOs in charge. But once they're large enough to harm either the HN audience or the tech ecosystem, the narrative tends to switch. E.g., Microsoft as the evil empire, or the way Google, Apple, and Facebook get a lot more skepticism. Often it's the same people and the same behaviors, it's just that we're at the sharp end of the stick.
So here it's Facebook and slavery. Given that most of us don't intend to keep slaves and we've become suspicious of FB's power, it's easy to identify with the slaves. But phrase it as an abstract issue in distributed systems and censorship resistance, and people will identify with the engineer/rebel character.
/insert satire tag here/
Now if we could just coordinate this better. On even days we can do liberal thinking, and odd days socially conscious thinking.
/close satire/
In any case most code I read here seems to be intended sarcastically.Facebook clearly isn't a public square. It's a platform with a dictator/censor/moderator who controls what is and isn't allowed on the platform. It also seems to be much more susceptible to groupthink, misinformation and extreme viewpoints than a real public square.
But Facebook isn't a publication either. When arguing against free speech on Facebook, some people compare it to newspapers and you'll hear arguments like "the New York Times isn't obliged to publish your article". But that's not what's happening here. Facebook operates more of a blacklist than a whitelist. Nobody thinks of the NYT as explicitly rejecting all but a select few people's writings, but they do think of Facebook as explicitly allowing whatever thing currently offends them.
So what is it? What should it be? These are questions we have to answer for ourselves. Applying rules from constitutions written 400 years ago might not be wise. But moving public discourse on to privately owned platforms is probably not wise either. I think the only thing that's clear right now is something is wrong.
Here's hoping that the white hot outrage is shared by most everyone on the planet and is independent of where it can be found.
That is not really an answer to your question.
Decentralization does not make illegal content uncensorable, in fact the opposite is true, because regular citizens and small organizations hosting individual nodes are exposed to a lot more risk and legal liability than a massive tech giant. These gigantic centralized networks allow this type of content to hide in plain sight because something like Facebook is "too big to fail" and won't ever be shutdown regardless of how many times illegal content is re-uploaded to the platform.
If I use the Chinese Remainder theorem to distribute data to five hosts, such that you need to get the data from three of them to reconstruct the file, which one is hosting it?
And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway?
This kind of technical obfuscation won't stymie a judge, the owners of all five nodes would be held liable if they were instrumental in facilitating access to the illegal material.
> And what if it's encrypted so that the host couldn't read the data anyway?
This isn't really a practical setup for a social media website. If the host can't decrypt the data then the social media users won't be able to do so either. People could share illegal content in some kind of private E2EE group chat like Signal, but in such a scenario decentralization is of no relevance since the buck stops at E2EE either way.
I'm not sure I understand your second objection. Suppose I publish a "status" including some copyrighted work and I encrypt it such that you need a private key corresponding to the private key of anyone on my friends list to decrypt. Then it's distributed among a thousand peers (who are not my friends), such that one of my friends can download from a random twenty, receive garbage from ten, and they'll have a 30% change of being able to reconstruct the encrypted file. Can you now prove that on the balance of probabilities a peer has violated the copyright?
Sure. Start with this: your perception of the “zeitgeist on HN” is based on the loudest commenters, but on different issues those are different sets of commenters. So, yeah, the zeitgeist of the subset of HN engaged by icky posts on Instagram is different than the zeitgeist of the subset engaged by decentralized sharing systems.
Second, where there is overlap, tribalism plays a role, and “anti-big-corp” alignment fits both stances you point to.
I think there are several different ideological clusters on in regarding "information freedom"-type ideas. Having just one would be no fun, and a bad reflection of the community. I'm no libertarian, but I think that that trying to censor away the problem is inevitably not going to stop the problems described. It will make them less visible though, and maybe push them to other platforms. It's more of a "moving the homeless on" solution, and similarly it's good for the individual service providers, but bad for the society as a whole.
Hence I think you can be unhappy that the content exists, but still not approve of online censorship.
For those who are teachers or parents, you notice a lot of that in the <12 age group. For those who are older, you notice that a lot in the elderly. It’s simply a cognitive thing that most kids eventually develop and perhaps old folks lose, but it may just be that older folks lose interest in complicated issues after a life of complicated things.
"Look a bad guy, ooohh I'm so mad, why aren't you mad?! Why aren't you mad!?! You're a bad guy. Look everyone it's a bad guy!" (please don't look at me though.)
Freedom of choice/movement/religion/opinion as long as you're not violating others freedom.
War on X <whatever it is> will never work, it never has, never will. We need better tools, and more love for our brothers and sisters in life.
Because it is decentralized doesn't mean that the content can't be filtered by the user... it depends how you build the system...
It's the difference between a vault of snuff VHS tapes hidden underground in a locked vault and a streaming snuff r' us channel that is promoted actively to people looking for snuff content, with the content mirrored globally for accessibility for all localities.
When it is your community making the choices about what is considered acceptable, that sort of community moderation is essential to a well functioning online community. When an external entity is imposing standards on your community, that is considered censorship.
The line between these two can be super fuzzy and arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that this distinction doesn't have real value to those who make that distinction.
The impetus towards federation is because people want their communities to be able to set their own standards rather than having to abide by whatever decisions Facebook/Apple/Google/Twitter et al make.
Edit: For example, HN is has some significant moderation. I believe the vast majority of the HN community think that this moderation is not only beneficial but crucial to the community. If the HN moderators lost the respect/buy-in/consent of their community then this would start to be viewed as censorship.
The decentralization impulse is yet another misguided techno-optimist hope of returning to smaller communities and thus somehow restoring the moderation effects of such settings. Which won't work, as the world of organic communities tied by kin relations (aka 'village') is completely different than the world of ever diverging echo chambers the Internet produces. The Global Village is intrinsically dysfunctional.
Facebook/Google cannot possibly perform healthy moderation at global scale, but fixing that can't be done short of banning the TCP/IP protocol.
As for feminism, the western world spent trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives trying to bring gender equality to Afghanistan. Truly the western world would be better off using soft power to create a more equal world instead of bombing people in to a culture of tolerance.
Are you claiming that the purpose of the Afghanistan war was to promote feminism? I don't remember that sales pitch. It's certainly one way to make a useless war sound noble.
Was that why we were there? Was it really?
And your evidence to support that is..?
There were essentially no limits to the brutality that could be inflected on a slave in the US, so any brutality that you find in the ancient world is easily matched by a brutality inflected in the US.
May be more accurate to say slavery in the US was less brutal than slavery in the French Caribbean or Spanish Argentina.
Apple privately threatening to ban Facebook is virtue signalling?
It's obvious that traffickers use any means to ply their trade, be it in people, drugs and other illegal activities. They will use FB, IG and apple solutions.
But Apple talks the talk about exploitation but keeps seeking the China market and continues to leverage Chinese manufacturing knowing well that China engages in activities that were they done in any US state or Western country, Apple would have a fit and would threaten to pull offices, staff and cease doing business as well as contributing to local opposition voices because they want to be part of the change--but they do none of that in China and, in effect, add the the problem.
Anyway, are Apple going to now refuse to sell phones to traffickers or run of the mill felons too lest they enable these baddies?
That said, China is doing bad stuff, checks out. Apple is complicit in benefiting from it, sure. So this isn't an objection to that, just to the "that wouldn't fly in the US"-hypocrisy.
And what about forced education for children in the US? Nobody bats an eye at that, except the victims themselves.
All I’m saying is Apple says one thing in one context and another in a different one, but they are not dissimilar so in effect they are hypocrites and don’t mean what they say and their values are relative.
Oh bad bad exploitation! Oh, but in China… never mind, we’ll just mind our own business…
I agree that Apple and all the other big techs say contradictory moral nonsense. They're just trying to please the public but the public itself has internally contradictory standards even with the same individuals so it's impossible for Apple to really make any sense unless it's willing to alienate everyone.