Can someone explain this to me? I ask this genuinely.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yes. People who have the power to fix something unjust and don't are complicit in that thing.
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.
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.
WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-tech-twitter-facebook-googl...
EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-shou...
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/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.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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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-... )
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.
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.
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.
>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.