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Comment by BrainVirus | Hacker News Reader

This is not an exception. This is the norm. All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something. The scale of censorship is ming-boggling. The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding.

The big lie of online censorship is that controversial cases where most people think the person "deserves" to be banned are unrelated and totally separate from cases like this one, where it's obvious the ban is preposterous to anyone possessing common sense. They are directly related. They are created by the same systems built under the same assumptions with the same mentality.

This is not going to be fixed by "better" algorithms, because it's not an issue with the quality of the algorithms in the firs place. The algorithms seem low-quality to you because you're judging them by a standard the company running them didn't use.

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The platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage.

So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms).

And I think I even know where the mob came from. Humans apparently have an intrinsic need to have some goals to be passionate about. And since the "economies of scale" have optimized away individual decision-making as outlets for passion, we see a surge of the good-old tribal instincts.

Cancel culture is certainly a progress from stabbing and eating the members of the competing tribe, it is still a manifestation of the same kind of instinct that will bring nothing good until people find (or, likely, create) a bigger problem to worry about.

> armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage

I just call them "lawyers."

To me, what you talk about with “economies of scale” is similar to the depravation of access to the power process people experience in industrial society that Ted Kaczynski described in Industrial Society and its Future. The work that our species did to stay alive, such as find food, is already handled by society, and the ability to influence the direction our lives, has been exported to corporate board rooms and legislative assemblies. As a result people now engage in surrogate activities to satisfy their needs to engage in the power process. This includes things like entertainment media, subcultures, and sports. Social media is another instantiation of surrogate activities. I think it’s no wonder that moderation is not benefiting the general public.

> The platforms do it because of armies of miserable people online looking for an outlet to their outrage.

I find this funny because I initially assumed you were talking about the seemingly infinite number of people posting the "straddle the line like it's a Hitachi wand" flamebait that typically gets axed. There's no way to make everyone happy, but I think there's a chance we can broadly agree that there's very little harm done by being overzealous when it comes to using the banhammer on outrage porn. I mean HN basically does the same thing but on a smaller scale.

> trying to appease the angry mob

I think this is half correct. They do it to prevent the angry mob from reaching out to advertisers. I don't think they care about angry mobs, themselves.

There is more to it than that.

Look up the use of Facebook in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. I see multiple comments in this thread about snowflakes and cancel culture but they miss that social media is a profoundly powerful instigator of race hate and violence.

This is no defence of Facebook's actions here but any suggestion that a hands off approach without policing racial language needs to be conscious of the harm it has already lead to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Paywalled, so I can’t directly address the points in the article.

Do humans not have thousands of years of genocide each other long before Facebook? It’s hard for me to believe that if only Facebook did not exist, everything would be fine in Myanmar. No, almost certainly they would have found a way to kill the other tribe.

>So the platforms are stuck trying to appease the angry mob, while spending as little resources on it as possible (hence, shitty algorithms).

Actually, I'd posit that the platforms are drooling with anticipation and glee at being able to monetize that angry mob. Anger, fear and outrage boosts engagement after all.

And that's what platforms want, because increased engagement means increased ad revenue. And that's not exactly breaking news either.

The people also utilize political ideologies whose primary tenets are things like "destabilize" and "deconstruct" as a surrogate religion instead of the passé ones that have proven themselves capable of underpinning functional society for thousands of years.

I suppose your local warlord ordering you to murder people in the crusades was "functional" society and writing mean things on Twitter is "nonfunctional" society in your mind.

A society that doesn't loathe itself and goes to war to murder other people is healthier than a society that loathes itself and still goes to war to murder other people.

Neither is ideal, but one results in one place being shitty and one being okay, the other makes two places shitty to live in.

As far as I'm concerned, international politics / geopolitics is appallingly Melian and I wish it were some other way but I think it's just the sociopathic shitshow we're stuck with.

The crusades were just an example, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says stubborn and drunken children are to be stoned to death by all the men of the city. No foreign adventurism is involved. Very "functional".

Many heroes of the bible also had slaves, and the bible does not suggest there is anything wrong with that. Although some religious people campaigned against slavery in America, the fact the bible does not state slavery was wrong, and depicts it as something God's favorite humans engaged in, was used as a counter argument to defend slave-owning by religious people.

It is the inverse Blackstone Ratio!

But I think we must also look why they end up this way. My thoughts are that a small portion of the public reacts so strongly and loudly to any minor mistake that it turns into national conversations. Ironically through their very platforms and algorithms that optimize for engagement (fighting). So we then paint these small populations as representative populations and make mountains out of mole hills.

I actually do believe a better algorithm would alleviate some of the issues. But I do agree that it is not a cure-all. The problem appears to be quite complex and many aspects are driven from or coupled with factors outside the control of social media platforms.

A small portion of the public will react to almost anything in any way. The censorship regime here must surely have been created by more complex factors, like maybe:

- Dependence on advertising, exposure to advertisers who feel like their brands appearing next to anything controversial or upsetting will negative-halo upon their brand.

- Ideological uniformity amongst journalists, who highlight certain kinds of outrage and sink others.

- A need for moral validation amongst tech company employees.

And we could think of many others. Trying to distill a root cause is hard but it looks like the everything-is-connected-to-everything mentality appears frequently. Is it really the case that an advert appearing next to something objectionable makes people think less of the brand? Probably not but it seems to be a common belief. Is it really the case that Facebook is to blame for any video posted on its platform? Probably not but it's a common belief. In a thread just a few days ago there was a former Twitter employee arguing that Facebook was somehow complicit or at fault in the Rohingya genocide, which is a good example of this mentality.

You could go even deeper and ask, is this everyone-is-culpable-for-everything mentality a genuine belief, or is it a possibly sub-conscious cover for some other agenda? That is, this argument seems to work on people sometimes, so it is deployed a useful tool to advance one ideology or another? Who can really say.

The advertising point is a red herring. Adtech companies have gotten very good at targeting exactly what content their adds will an will not appear on. When they censor it is because they do not want you to see it.

> The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN is even more astounding. After reading some of the comments here you're absolutely right :(

Use two line breaks to put your content on a new line. If you use one, it will all be under the same line like happened to your comment here.

> The scale of denial and ignorance about censorship on HN

Even here, where you would think people would know better, you still see people insist that it's not censorship because it's not the government doing it.

Facebook is the government. PRISM [1] makes it explicit in Facebook's case, but any corporation beholden to a government for its continued operation is a policy arm of that government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Just curious, can you name some large companies for which this doesn’t hold? Or are you saying that all corporations are arms of the government?

It's a continuum, not a binary distinction. People tend to say, "this is government" or "this is not government". I disagree with that model, but it's a defensible position. What's not defensible is saying "this is not government therefore the first amendment doesn't apply" to a corporation that was secretly deputized by a government agency.

To answer your question, here's an example continuum from "more government" to "less government":

1. Elected officials

2. Federal employees / appointees

3. The Federal Reserve (private but heavily controlled)

4. Facebook (private but deputized)

5. Your local bank (whose existence is a government granted monopoly)

6. Utilities (some regional monopolies / limited competition)

7. General Motors / General Electric (heavily subsidized via negative taxes / bailouts)

8. General Mills (regulated but not necessarily beholden)

9. 3M (held to general standards like OSHA)

10. You (for definitions of you that do not fit into an example above)

People act like the line is somewhere between #2 and #3, but the reality is likely past #7.

> All major social media platforms operate under the assumption that it's better to ban 100 innocent people than to let one "bad" person publish something.

Unless they pay for their publications (aka ads), in that case FB has a history of letting the most horrible shit slip "regrettably through their screening team". Bollocks.

Did you even read TFA? This is about payed advertising for the film on FB.

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